I couldn't pin down one reason why I have chosen to write. I used to spend a lot of my free time as a kid reading books in my room, so I suppose going there would be a good start. I would write a lot back then, but nothing ever too serious. I didn't expect really anybody to see what I had written, so it wasn't very polished. In fact, I didn't even think that my writing was very good until teachers in school would tell me they had liked it. This didn't really get me too excited. I figured teachers were paid to say shit like that. What was the point in believing it?
It wasn't until I hit high school that I saw a different way of writing, and it was a writing that struck a cord emotionally. The first experience I had was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. I remember reading it, and thinking that not really a lot was happening; it was just two guys wandering through the desert while on drugs, but I recall feeling like I had to keep reading to see what was going to happen. I had never felt like this, and it was really addicting.
It continued on. In English class, I came across a story by Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron, and it made me start having these strange thoughts... What if I tried doing something like this? It wasn't boring or pretentious like a lot of stuff they made you read in high school, it was something that finally spoke to me. I am not saying that the stuff I was reading was bad, it just had never made me feel or think on this crazy level before. I remember looking up the story in my textbook many times before the semester was over, just to try to recapture that crazy flutter that filled my chest when I had finished the story the first time. I was chasing the dragon, but this high was a literary, and not a narcotic one.
Senior year of high school was when shit really hit the fan. I discovered Hubert Selby Jr. After I had read that, it completely changed the entire landscape of reading and writing for me. I discovered him like most people discovered Selby in the 2000s, by watching Requiem for a Dream. I remember after watching it, reading the back cover of the DVD box, and thinking, "Jesus Christ, how was THIS a book?" I couldn't believe it. I couldn't ever picture anything like that on a written page. I had to find out more, so I jumped on my laptop and Googled everything I could about the movie, as well as the author, Hubert Selby Jr. I saw that he had written a book before Requiem, The Last Exit to Brooklyn, so I decided to pick that up and give it a whirl.
I had to wait until I got paid, which was about a week away, but I remember counting the days until I would be able to buy it. I even did a couple of dry runs, going over to the Barnes and Noble that was across from the Baggins sandwich shop that I worked at, looking over the shelves until I knew the placement of the book by heart. I could probably walk into that store blindfolded, and still be able to find that damn Selby book, and the closer I got to pay day, I felt my frenzy growing larger. As soon as my shift let out I shot over to the bookstore across the street. As soon as I purchased it and was out the door, I started thumbing through the pages, looking over the paragraphs in glances. It looked so different, unlike any book I had ever been given in school. The punctuation seemed all messed up, and some words weren't even spelled correctly, they had just been phonetically spelled out. It seemed so wrong compared to what I had always been shown and told about writing. I spent the next three days doing nothing but smoking pot and reading that book, but at the end of it, I can honestly say that I never looked at literary works the same way ever again.
After reading Brooklyn, I felt like I couldn't read the same books I had been reading. Once I had a peak into this kind of reading, I felt like I had to find all of the books I could that made me feel like Selby did. It turned into this strange quest to find these particular books that had certain criteria that were impossible to pin down. When I would tell some people how much I loved reading, I remember getting empty looks back. People don't really like to read anymore. They did in the 50s, maybe even all the way up through the 80s and the early 90s, but now when you ask someone what they read, they may give you a website or a Twitter feed that they follow.
But even with the disinterest, I still felt trapped. Books were my passion.
It wasn't long after reading all of this stuff that I started trying writing on my own. I had written a lot when I was a kid, but to be honest, I didn't think it was all that serious. It would mostly be a way to pass the time. But now, I felt like writing became an obsession.
For a while, I felt that a lot of the stuff I wrote was whatever I was reading regurgitated back onto the page. I feel a lot of young writers go through this because you are just latching onto whatever idea may come to mind. A lot of what writing is sometimes is just stacking ideas on top of each other, and seeing what fits. Worst case scenario, you don't have shit, but you still have the ideas that you can build upon later on if need be. Writing is trying to be resourceful. You try to make things work because you have a good idea, but you may not be experienced/skilled enough to pull it off yet. The important thing is that you work through this phase.
Why spend so much time working through this phase? I honestly couldn't tell you. A lot of times I felt it was because I had some strange standard when it came to my writing. I didn't want people to read what I wrote and think that I was bad, or that I was out there faking it. Some of the worst writing was the stuff you read where you knew the person didn't know shit, but they felt like they knew enough to pass it off in their work. Nothing is more insulting to a reader than this. But for myself, I just like it. I love writing things out, and reading things over and over again, and try to see how I can make the words fit better, or have the sentences flow smoother. It's an amazing thrill that I can't really find anywhere else.
It's reasons like that I started this blog and writing to publish. I don't feel the need to do it for fame or for getting rich. That's probably the most unrealistic goal that a writer can have. You may as well just spend all your money on scratchers and start going to town. I want to write because it feels natural, and I love doing it.
I feel some people were put on this earth to do certain things. I hope you all find the things that you were meant to do. It's an amazing feeling, pursuing what you love. Being true to oneself is very important, and highly undervalued in society. Once you find something that you love that much, don't let anything get in the way. Work through it, figure it out or make sacrifices somewhere else because you don't want to find yourself doing things you HAVE to do because you didn't do things differently.
