Date: 05/07/22
When people talk about the impact that the internet had on artists, they usually begin and end with access - this David-and-Goliath myth of people snubbing their noses at the gatekeepers. For many creatives, though, the truly exciting part was the interactivity. Artists have always experimented with form, and digital art adds a new dimension in that it can involve the user directly.
And people made use of this. They wrote stories in the form of websites and invited the reader to walk through the worlds they'd created. A principle of design at the time was the notion of the website as a "site," as a virtual recreation of a real world place. Each page wasn't a document but a room, and the visitor could explore the halls of this fictitious space and even, to some extent, interact with its inhabitants.
Time has only expanded the possibilities here. New software added visual and auditory elements to these fictional sites. Fictitious characters had their own blogs, their own accounts, and those accounts could speak to each other. It was a whole new dimension to storytelling, and the only true limits were within the writer's mind.
But there was a problem, as there always is. The internet was meant to make a million flowers bloom, but really it just made the biggest stars even more visible. The gatekeepers didn't go away, they just changed. And as the market became more competitive, creative storytelling went from being an innovation to a gimmick, exploited by the fame hungry in hopes of snaring just a little bit of clout.
The way out? Start a project that is doomed to fail. It's very liberating.
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Date: 05/10/22
Writing about one's personal pain is always risky. Some people say it's cathartic, and maybe it is. Other people, though, don't write for catharsis. They write to be published, to have a career, and they figure inking literature in their own blood is a way to achieve that.
Then comes the moment when you have to let others see your work. You have to take this thing that was hard for you to write - emotionally hard, not creatively hard - and let some editors run their smooth, oily fingers all over it. You have to give them yet another opportunity to put their noses in the air, but this time it's not spec piece that only cost you a few hours of your life, but rather a piece of your life.
In short, to write about your pain is to let others judge you not merely as a writer, but as a human being. It's not something I recommend.
Yet so many publications say that they want writing like this. They ask to see our pain, to watch us bleed, even as they know most of those wounded parties won't make the cut. It is a sick practice. It is a sick industry.
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Date: 05/14/22
Much of my life is still an enigma. There are many things that I don't know and that I probably never will - all the parties involved are dead and they've taken their secrets with them. So I compile the facts that I can find and thread them together with stories of my own.
It's a very human thing to do. We are a storytelling species, and as much as we may imagine we are purely rational creatures, that rationality still needs some structures. Even if I could speak with someone with the information I wanted, it would just be another story. What I have created is a work of knowing fiction to fill in the gaps. It isn't fully accurate - the ages are off, and it's not the most plausible route through this alternative life of mine.
Even so, it has been an interesting exercise. I've had to learn how to view myself as other see me. This sort of perspective isn't something that most of us ever have to employ. For a writer of fiction, I strongly recommend the exercise - but I recommend it for just about everyone. It's a part of empathy that most people overlook.
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