My Own Worst Critic

Here's why I'm having trouble writing anything lately, I think. I'm afraid of what the man I will be in one, five, ten, fifty years will think of what I have done now and dismiss it for the juvenile self-absorbed dreck I'm already sure it is. And if I can barely read what I've written five minutes ago without gagging, how can I hold my head up and present it to my future self and say here, this what I am. This is serious. I hate that anything I labour over now will one day be just considered part of the learning experience. Damn it I want to write now.

I want to think that I'm am good at this but there still feels like there is so much I don't know and in the mean time, in the middle of this period of uncertainty I can't push myself to write because I know whatever comes out won't be the modern literary classic I so need it to be. I suppose I should be writing short stories, just pumping them out like they were unloved hillbilly babies just to get the hang of this story telling thing but I can't do it. This paralyzing self-awareness is killing me. When was the last time I really, really actually wrote something? These don't count of course. Blog posts aren't anything. They're just distractions really; a way to tell myself, hey look at least you're writing something. No, no, not really. Not really anything at all.

Things were easier back when I thought I would worm my way onto the op-ed page of some fish wrapper and that would be as far as my words would go. Then I started blogging and I realized that stuffing my opinions down other people's throats was about as far a way from what I wanted to do with my life as I could get. There is nothing fun about saying this is right and this is wrong and you are stupid for disagreeing, stupid. Well, not for me at least, though I'm sure there will never ever be a shortage of people who feel naked if not perched on their soapbox. I am not the fiery spokesman of the middle class, the speaker phone for class consciousness or the clarion bell of common sense. I can not tell it like it is, because I don't think it ever really is in that sense, you know? Shades of gray, and etc.

So my writerly ambitions swung back to fiction, literary fiction, as if I would ever be so gauche as to write anything that would dare to show its cover in a drug store, and I convinced myself that I do indeed have a book inside me, somewhere, hiding. A great book. I would settle for nothing less.

Settle for nothing less. That's the maddening perfectionism that leads to my barren stable of stories. I know that kind of attitude is enough to label me a douche, but that's why I write this incognito; this is not the type of thing you tell people face to face otherwise they look at you funny like you were slightly off your rocker and then give their heads tiny patient shakes and polite laughs and say can't wait to read it.

There's this going on as we speak, NaNoWriMo, maybe you heard, where people lock themselves in a room with a typewriter for the month of November and just write. Just write and write and write and push out a cute 50,000 word novel in the space of just one month. The novels are all crap of course, but that's hardly the point. The point is to force yourself to stop editing every sentence twice before it hits the page and just let loose and go crazy all over the keyboard. Burn that mother up. I should have done it. They scheduled it during one of the worst months of the school year for me, but that wouldn't have mattered; I barely do any work anyway. I'm just a big pussy. I'm scared of what 50,000 words would look like. 50,000 of my words all spread over that Word document like honey on bread.

Something I noticed about blogging: it's so much more enjoyable when you do it for yourself and no one else. When you start writing with an eye towards, "what do people want to see?", that's when you run in to trouble. Be true to yourself right? When you write with an audience in mind it can only restrict you. Maybe that's what you want though? Maybe you want people to actually read your words? Maybe you want to make a few cents off your google ads? I remember when I first started blogging I was pretty sure it would be a short road to blogger famedom and I wrote like I was Dave Barry's unacknowledged bastard son all saccharine pop culture inoffensive punchline fun and that didn't work and I read back now and I just feel slightly embarrassed that there was ever a time I could confidently sign my name to the end of those posts. Now I'm all inaccessible like a Chinese menu and I love it. It is so freeing. So what if nobody reads this, it's the Internet man. It's a big place, and I think there's more than enough space for me to tuck away and be happy. Artistic integrity, and etc.

Horatio Halpern