I...(part four)

...totally agree with the quote by Cyril Connolly that it's "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

Too often as of late, I've read a lot of things that seem to have been great ideas but somehow got lost in the shuffle as they made their way toward public consumption.

Take, for example, Under The Dome, which I mentioned in a prior post. For about 90% of the book, I was enthralled at how life in a small town can break down very quickly if cut off from the rest of the world. Had Stephen King stuck to his guns, he would have had one of the best post 9/11 stories about paranoia and religious zeal gone very awry. Instead, he opted to add some supernatural and unearthly elements to it that managed to ultimately make the novel pull the very punch it was trying to land in making a point.

The current book I'm reading (The Moment Of Psycho: How Hitchcock Taught America To Love Murder) as well as a previous book (Looking For Calvin & Hobbes) both had great premises (well, to me at least as the movie and comic strip were works of art) but fell flat. The issue with both was that we're taken out of the prose and what the authors were attempting to relay to the reader when they decided to insert themselves and their experiences with each subject into the mix.

First of all, I don't care how much Moment author David Thomson enjoyed Psycho when he was 19 and living in London (perhaps because the title refers to America loving the film as an example) and how much fun Looking's author Nevin Martell's tour of Bill Watterson's hometown was. Second of all, both books eventually stray from their primary objective. In Thomson's case, he wanders off to talk about Hitchcock's next features which is relatively unnecessary. Martell's attempt to interview Watterson is a bust (although to be fair to him, it is for everyone else too), but he feels the need to describe first hand about his overall excitement for the creator. Hey, I love the southwest, but if I can't get the research I need about it to include it in a book, I'm not going to write about my itinerary.

Of course it's important for every author to have a voice. That's what writing is all about. But it seems as if more and more writers are pandering to everyone instead of having a singular voice (which is why I love reading authors like David Sedaris, Barbara Ehrenreich and Chuck Klosterman as well as columnists like Bill Simmons--they all have maintained their voices as the years have gone by).

Maybe to me, writing seems more of a personal venture designed to thrill myself and see where the story takes me. If others enjoy it, so be it (which would be nice so that I could actually...*gasp*...make a living at something I love to do). But if it doesn't, that's still ok with me because I know that I'll enjoy it.

Admittedly, somewhere along the line, I have to confess that I lost my sense of self. Take my TV column, for example. Back when Billy Mays died, I posted an obituary on him. I had over 10,000 hits that day resulting in over $100 in my pocket.

That was nice.

But that week, I tried to strike while the iron was hot, tossing out several meaningless articles to keep that fire raging. It eventually went out. When I returned to the column, I felt something missing.

The passion was gone.

I think it was because I realized that what I was writing wasn't me. It was just a rehash of what was going on in the world of TV instead of something personal that I could add to it. As time went on, working full time interfered with viewing shows that I should have been writing about so I was pushed farther and farther from my original goal.

I could also add that the same thing happened with the blog. In an old blog that I used to write (long ago and in another lifetime it seems), I could always come up with something interesting. Whether it was ruminations on everyday life, observations on something in particular, or even to share a funny story, the writing wasn't necessarily about me, but about life and things that we all can laugh at. It was more a shared experience as viewed through my eyes and a singular voice.

That's not to say that this blog panders to a particular audience, because...what audience?

From what I can see, it was a shifting perspective and an unhappiness of where I was in life to where I was going. My old blog kind of withered away (though I saved a great deal of the posts for ideas in stories down the line) and gave birth to this one. The old one died at a time when I was besieged by issues of living arrangements and personal matters.

Since starting this one, those perspectives have shifted again and who's to say where this one will end up?

Maybe it's time to start writing for myself again...

...maybe.