paganbabies

Creative Writing 101

The only thing worse than reading the work of a bad writer is reading the work of a bad writer who thinks she is good. I know I'm bad. I've tried, what I got was awful and I've moved on. I stick to essays because I use adjectives like a sticky paste applied with clubbed hands, and my style hasn't improved since eighth grade. Most people have had the misfortune at least once of reading the writing of some young girl (I'm not deliberately picking on women, but they are more often the offenders, in this case because of the stigma against artistic men, or even men who read anything beside the sports or business sections of the newspaper - which accounts for a full 7% of this nation's problems), and those poor folks know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm reminded of a Stewie Griffin paraphrase that follows the same line, when he notes that often a young woman will get a camera, shoot a few black and white photos and suddenly she's all "brooding and deep." But it happens in men, too. Really it's just the result of a person lacking in original ideas or even identity seeking to co opt the perceived romance of the starving artist by taking it on as his rôle - to impose himself as the intellectual if not at least the cultural lodestar for his cadre of fellow notthinkers - that group which is half the time composed of other artsy types and half the time comprises a variance of other forced identities, united only in their momentary and forced appreciation of Gauguin while the starving artist discusses the work he would be doing if he were at the university he refuses to attend because the Art/English/Music department there has only incompetent codgers on the faculty and doesn't not attend because he was refused admittance or simply has not applied. Or, perhaps, he is at the university and his attitude (not attitude; governing principle, school of thought) changes about every two weeks, based on the lectures, so where once you were hearing about the importance of sparing and terse language in literature, you are now hearing, no more than ten days later, of the necessity for a reflection of stream of conscious reality in writing and here, reader - yes I'm talking to you - I hope you have noticed the Faulkner in the last two sentences. OK, not the Faulkner, as I'm just this side of certain that none of you have ever read Faulkner - this illustrating, at the very least, two points: One, that almost nobody younger than 30 reads Faulkner (For fuck's sake, most don't read anything thicker than Maxim, and even those magazines go 80% unread) and Two: that I am exactly the type of person I am describing: I am the type of person who talks down to you for not reading Faulkner when I myself have read (and struggled mightily to do it) only two of his novels and a few short stories; I don't have any original ideas, which is clear because, if I had, two things would change: I would stop (poorly) copping my style from my Author of the Month, and two, I would try my hand at the really hard stuff, like the creative writing I began speaking of in the first place, rather than tearing down others who at least have the guts (imbecility) to try it. But I occupy an uncommon (by which I mean absolutely common, shared by all thinking persons, but which each person thinks is held only by him) position, I stand in rarefied air - I'm discerning enough to know what makes these idiartists so bad, but too dumb, ineffectual, talentless to transcend them and make something worthwhile on my own. So I rationalize my way out of responsibility for this. I would sing in a metal band, but I'm not an awesome screamer. I'd be a graphic artist, but I lack the hardware/software and the time to learn. I'd be X but for the fact that Y - as long as X is something a pseudointellectual would want to be and Y is comfortably outside my control or at least not related to (the actual, root obstacle) my lack of creativity or will to create. And even that lack or idea of lack is bullshit, because is presupposes or implies that those who do create successfully are passive observers who simply have creativity foisted upon them which they then execute robotically, when really they work as hard at creating as I do at rationalizing my way out of creating or at tearing down the products of these jerks who try to do what neither of us can do but still try because they're not smart enough to rationalize their way out of it, nor are they smart enough to create something good enough for me or anybody else to like or want to have read or seen or consumed or whatever it is we do with the products of creativity, and don't try to tell me that you are being creative by improving your monthly sales or your business's bottom line or whatever it is capitalism has mislead you into believing to be a valid outlet for humanity/creativity in order that it can perpetuate itself by divesting you of all that was you which did not and cannot relate to a profit for company shareholders - must necessarily be quashed in you because it could actually, perhaps, detract from the profit for the shareholders by allowing you some freedom of thought in which to glimpse yourself (or at least that part of yourself of which you have been divested) as a separate entity from the generating and production of your paycheck and their dividends. Yes. My lack of creativity. My lack of creativity has led to the production of this, which is a treatise that (hopefully) cuts at least part way in to part of something you thought was true or good or worthwhile, but which has, instead, been here stood before us and called "worthless" (which at least I have called myself). This: a mute manifesto: read by few and believed by none and therefore less than no production, a (-1), a red mark in the accounting ledger of Human Development, Generation and Production, so that, when I go down, there won't be a credit to my name, nor even a zero, but rather I will die in debt to all humanity, less than nonplussed, a reversal of thermodynamics, sucking up and condensing what you're trying to produce and vent, into a sub-nothingness.