Post a Comment On: The Writer's Journey

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Wow, it's been quite a while since I updated. I don't think I've ever gone this long between posts before. The two people who read it must have been disappointed. :(

Since I've been away from here, I've mostly been obnoxious. I've always known that I have some obnoxious tendencies, but over the past few months I've really started to notice just how bad it really is. This week I've been thinking a lot about where that comes from and whether that's part of what drives me to tinker obsessively with impossible stories that just seem to never quite come together in their potential entirety.

Is it obnoxiousness that drives writers? Hemingway was pretty full on, and most of the greats seem to be pretty terrible. Darwin was apparently nice, as was that guy who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, but that's pretty much it. The rest of them are people who get in fights every time they go to Chick-Fil-A. Um, not that that happened Tuesday night. But yeah, most of the writers you read about were essentially damaged in some way. Obnoxious, secretive, reclusive, obsessive- these things irritate the people around me, but they worked for Poe, Faulkner, Byron, Wilde, Blake, Barrie, poor Mad Shelley and Vonnegut. I'm starting to think that people without a little crazy in them aren't really worth bothering with.

The next time I see the neighbors watch me going outside and sort of wince, I'm going to try to think of the great company that I am in and not how much I want to tell off most of the people around me.