"I need to do some more writing," he thought.
I used to think of myself as a character in a novel. Thoughts like the entry title above would come into my head and reinforce the image. When you think of yourself in the third person, life becomes a bit more abstract and perhaps bearable. The story I was in could have used a lot of editing, though, and probably wouldn't have sold very well. Such is my childhood. I write this as an adult, though perhaps not with an adult's perspective on things.
Haruki Murakami said in an essay that part of being a writer is just living. How you fight, get drunk, meet people - in other words, live, is the most essential thing for a writer. The only other things that you need are a little talent and some work. For a reading comprehension question on a practice test for the Japanese proficiency test, it was a pretty good paragraph. It made me think of my favorite kind of writing, and thus my favorite kind of writers. Most of them seem like pretty extraordinary people who write mostly semi-fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Part of the attraction, then, is in this mixture of fantasy and reality. It's almost like an idealized form of reality: the details are mostly real, but massaged with fiction to improve the flow and make things more interesting. In short, editing life.
Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tim Rogers are all interesting writers because their writing couldn't have been done by anyone else but them. Or, to put it differently, they're good enough so that their writing seems like a small glimpse into very interesting lives. Could anyone else but me write this? I think so. I don't plan to compare myself to them, but if my own current situation isn't that amusing for the guy living it, I can't expect to get that much good writing out of it. Of course, life should probably not be judged by the standard of that Army commercial that went, "If someone wrote a book about your life, would you read it?"
Haruki Murakami said in an essay that part of being a writer is just living. How you fight, get drunk, meet people - in other words, live, is the most essential thing for a writer. The only other things that you need are a little talent and some work. For a reading comprehension question on a practice test for the Japanese proficiency test, it was a pretty good paragraph. It made me think of my favorite kind of writing, and thus my favorite kind of writers. Most of them seem like pretty extraordinary people who write mostly semi-fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Part of the attraction, then, is in this mixture of fantasy and reality. It's almost like an idealized form of reality: the details are mostly real, but massaged with fiction to improve the flow and make things more interesting. In short, editing life.
Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tim Rogers are all interesting writers because their writing couldn't have been done by anyone else but them. Or, to put it differently, they're good enough so that their writing seems like a small glimpse into very interesting lives. Could anyone else but me write this? I think so. I don't plan to compare myself to them, but if my own current situation isn't that amusing for the guy living it, I can't expect to get that much good writing out of it. Of course, life should probably not be judged by the standard of that Army commercial that went, "If someone wrote a book about your life, would you read it?"