ten thousand words
There's an old quote among comic book artists that every artist has ten thousand bad drawings in them, and once they have drawn those they can start doing good drawings. I don't think there is a similar phrase for writers, but there probably should be.
I was poking around in my old zine pile the other day and read through some copies of my old zine, No Scene Anywhere. I wrote it back in college and kept it up through about 1993 or 1994, when I started making music and stopped writing about it. It was kind of fun, and was a good way to get free records and a bunch of free trade zines back then, even if most of them were fairly crappy. But considering the level at which I was writing, exchanging one for someone else's crappy zine was pretty much a fair trade.
Damn, I couldn't write for shit back then. I suppose I occasionally got a good idea and even banged out a memorable turn of phrase once in a while, but it's kind of weird to look back at what I was writing and how bad it was. Although in some ways it's not so much the writing as the sort of earnest, well-meaning cluelessness the writing practically oozes, so much that it's practically a style. The best part is the clip art and the sketches I stuck in the corners.
I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on my 21-24 year old self. I was still pretty idealistic, still had my hair, and still had a whole lot to learn about music, life, politics and people--but assumed I knew it all. And I suppose it's one of my 10,000 bad drawings. While I still tend to be my own biggest critic when it comes to my writing, I am at least a lot more confident in my abilities. Getting paid to write definitely helps in that respect. And I suppose I can break out my old zines if I ever want to remind myself of what progress I have made--and what kind of fun times I had in the early nineties when I still had my hair (and it was blue) and my idealism (it was kinda yellow-green.)
I was poking around in my old zine pile the other day and read through some copies of my old zine, No Scene Anywhere. I wrote it back in college and kept it up through about 1993 or 1994, when I started making music and stopped writing about it. It was kind of fun, and was a good way to get free records and a bunch of free trade zines back then, even if most of them were fairly crappy. But considering the level at which I was writing, exchanging one for someone else's crappy zine was pretty much a fair trade.
Damn, I couldn't write for shit back then. I suppose I occasionally got a good idea and even banged out a memorable turn of phrase once in a while, but it's kind of weird to look back at what I was writing and how bad it was. Although in some ways it's not so much the writing as the sort of earnest, well-meaning cluelessness the writing practically oozes, so much that it's practically a style. The best part is the clip art and the sketches I stuck in the corners.
I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on my 21-24 year old self. I was still pretty idealistic, still had my hair, and still had a whole lot to learn about music, life, politics and people--but assumed I knew it all. And I suppose it's one of my 10,000 bad drawings. While I still tend to be my own biggest critic when it comes to my writing, I am at least a lot more confident in my abilities. Getting paid to write definitely helps in that respect. And I suppose I can break out my old zines if I ever want to remind myself of what progress I have made--and what kind of fun times I had in the early nineties when I still had my hair (and it was blue) and my idealism (it was kinda yellow-green.)