Sometimes I like to imagine that my life is actually really interesting and I will someday be called upon to do a DVD-style commentary of it. Luckily for me and the world at large, the Internet exists, so I can type my merry heart out and everyone else can continue diligently ignoring me as they rightly should.
Anyway, one of the things I've been dying to talk about in the most figurative way imaginable is writing, my history with it, and why it is that I like pumping out words the way that I do. I find it helps to reflect on the nature of our art - it humbles us, brings us down to earth, and generally makes us less snobbish.
I suppose you could say I've always been a fan of writing, but even to this day I don't think I'd ever label myself as a "writer." Instead, I prefer to say "I write" because to me, there's a world of difference. A writer is someone who is intoxicated by the power of words, who practices and attempts to master the many nuances of grammar, and who values their own style and treats it as an extension of their mind. I do none of those things. For me, writing is simply the means to an end, and I've done it enough that I'm simply above average.
Let me back up a bit. I initially took up with writing as a result of my elementary school graduation. See, I'm the academically competitive type, and my brother had won the Top Academic Award (pretty much meant he was best overall) when he had graduated four years previous, so I was aiming for the same thing because I wasn't about to let him get a one-up on me. But fate gave me a backhand, and instead I got the lesser English Award. This came as a shock, namely because I never excelled in English classes. To this day I think they just had to give me something (I was still one of the top students) and they deemed the English Award an appropriate token gesture. I ended up taking it as a challenge though, one I carried all the way to university.
I figured if they gave me the English Award, then fuck it, I might as well make it my thing. And so that token award became my motivation to excel in my high school English classes, which was very difficult because I really did suck at it. Honestly, I was terrible. I still can't understand why they gave it to me, but nonetheless I carried around that challenge like the goddamn plague and eventually graduated high school with an English and Creative Writing Award in tow. I enrolled in English at Carleton University and promptly switched majors to Film Studies because it seemed like the more practical thing to pursue (hint: it wasn't).
I continued to write, though. Throughout high school I had been developing a story in the back of my mind that I was determined to put to paper. It spent years festering and growing, taking influence from everything I encountered. I tried to sit down and write it on several occasions, sometimes writing a page, sometimes fifteen, but it never matched my vision. It wasn't until second year university when circumstance allowed me to write a first draft I was actually proud of. It was a relatively small accomplishment (only eighty or so pages) but to me it had been a Herculean feat, and having accomplished it, I was no longer scared to attempt it again. I knew that if I could write one book then I could easily write another, and so that following summer I wrote my first "real" novel. I found myself with a lot of extra time during the subsequent Christmas vacation, so I wrote another, and the next summer I re-wrote my first story as a four hundred page behemoth (which will be rewritten again in the near future, because I'm crazy like that). After university I attended a year of Scriptwriting at college and wrote my fourth "real" novel after graduating, just to make sure I still could.
Despite all of the monumental time and effort I put into each book, I would still say I'm not the biggest fan of actually writing. It's annoying, it takes too long, and it's near impossible to convince anyone to read your shit. To me, writing was simply the means to an end; what I really wanted to do was tell stories, and writing was (and still is) the most effective way of going about that. I couldn't make a film or a graphic novel on my own, so writing my stories as books was the only natural way to go. See, I don't have much in the way of actual writing ability. What I excel at is being disciplined and patient. That's the tricky part. Sitting down at a computer and typing is ridiculously easy; what's hard is to make yourself do it every day for months on end until you have something to show for it. I have plenty of friends who are much, much better writers than I am, but the difference between us is that I can fire off pages like Stephen King. In essence, it's quantity over quality. I like to think my books can hold up based on the nature of the plot and the overall premise of their stories, but I know no one is going to be reading anything of mine because they appreciate my style.
I recently had a discussion with my roommate regarding the nature of art and the idea of innate talent versus practice. She's an incredibly talented artist (and you should totally check out her portfolio at http://www.lydiapepin.com/) but she insisted she had to practice in order to get to the skill level she's at. And while that is obviously inarguable, it also can't be denied that she has an innate talent for it, because her mind has a way of discerning visual detail that I (and most others) simply can't. And yet I have no idea whether or not I have any sort of innate talent/skill for the activities I consider my "art" or if I'm just very disciplined and willing to put in a lot of effort into something until I'm halfway decent. I taught myself how to play guitar, and while I like to think I'm pretty good, I didn't pick one up until I was seventeen and I had absolutely no natural affinity for it. I have a sneaking suspicion that my writing is the same, which is why I don't like to call myself a "writer" and instead prefer to just say "I write." I consider my writing competent at best, and I'm sure with a proper editor some of my novels would do just fine on the literary scene, but I have no hopes of one day being taught in university English courses.
For me, the accomplishment comes from expressing something. With my novels, it's constructing a narrative out of thin air. For this blog, it's about expressing ideas. I have a constant desire to feel like I've accomplished something, and writing is a cheap and easy way to do that. I suppose it's the masturbation of the storytelling arts, because you only need yourself and more often than not you end up feeling satisfied and yet a little disappointed (Ba-Dum-Tish!). And I consider some of this ironic, because writing was one of the things I did while everyone else was off with their social lives and having sex and doing other fun things, and being able to present a book and say "well, at least I accomplished something" was the only way I could justify my meager existence.
So that's why I write. I'm not concerned with furthering the human language, I don't really care for proper grammar rules so long as something reads okay, and you'll never find me wearing a sweater with a glass of scotch. I just get a lot of crazy ideas/stories in my head and writing is my go-to way of expressing them. I still don't know if I'd ever consider myself a real artist, but I suppose I'd better because it's not like my pro-athlete career is going to pan out anytime soon.
I recently had a discussion with my roommate regarding the nature of art and the idea of innate talent versus practice. She's an incredibly talented artist (and you should totally check out her portfolio at http://www.lydiapepin.com/) but she insisted she had to practice in order to get to the skill level she's at. And while that is obviously inarguable, it also can't be denied that she has an innate talent for it, because her mind has a way of discerning visual detail that I (and most others) simply can't. And yet I have no idea whether or not I have any sort of innate talent/skill for the activities I consider my "art" or if I'm just very disciplined and willing to put in a lot of effort into something until I'm halfway decent. I taught myself how to play guitar, and while I like to think I'm pretty good, I didn't pick one up until I was seventeen and I had absolutely no natural affinity for it. I have a sneaking suspicion that my writing is the same, which is why I don't like to call myself a "writer" and instead prefer to just say "I write." I consider my writing competent at best, and I'm sure with a proper editor some of my novels would do just fine on the literary scene, but I have no hopes of one day being taught in university English courses.
For me, the accomplishment comes from expressing something. With my novels, it's constructing a narrative out of thin air. For this blog, it's about expressing ideas. I have a constant desire to feel like I've accomplished something, and writing is a cheap and easy way to do that. I suppose it's the masturbation of the storytelling arts, because you only need yourself and more often than not you end up feeling satisfied and yet a little disappointed (Ba-Dum-Tish!). And I consider some of this ironic, because writing was one of the things I did while everyone else was off with their social lives and having sex and doing other fun things, and being able to present a book and say "well, at least I accomplished something" was the only way I could justify my meager existence.
So that's why I write. I'm not concerned with furthering the human language, I don't really care for proper grammar rules so long as something reads okay, and you'll never find me wearing a sweater with a glass of scotch. I just get a lot of crazy ideas/stories in my head and writing is my go-to way of expressing them. I still don't know if I'd ever consider myself a real artist, but I suppose I'd better because it's not like my pro-athlete career is going to pan out anytime soon.
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