Perfect World Take Two

essay

Hello one and all! Thank you for muddling through the last fifty posts or so, if you have done so... if not, don't take credit which you don't deserve. But if you are one of the brave ones, I commend you... and feel for you.

Though I'm certainly not the first, I have reinvented the wheel... but developed one with four sharp corners. That's how I feel about writing all year without direction or editing, and virtually no feedback-- traveling down a long road on square tires.

What did I think would happen? I didn't make this blog widely available-- just wrote it and stuck it here for all to see, a little like viewing a head on a pike.

And what was I expecting, really? The subject matter could be considered... well, dull. It's politics, after all. It's not sexy. All it is is one man's dream for a better social system... one which really doesn't have an iceberg's chance in hell of becoming a reality. Not in my lifetime.

Okay, should I whine? Should I complain that you aren't following my ideas with tongue-wagging excitement? Nah. What does whining achieve, really, except the tut-tuts of a few 'told-you-so'ers anyway? If I wanted any of this to be exciting I would report on real steps being taken in the world today that are leading us to the future I envision.

The problem with that approach is that there are too few examples to cite, and the ones that do exist are anemic at best... not hardly the 'build a new city and import like-minded people to prove this can work' approach I have been penning.

What few reviews I have received began hopefully enough... people hated the very idea of it. So why do I say hopeful? Because of the tenet 'any great new idea will be dually hated and loved.' I figured I just hadn't met the ones who loved the idea yet, so I figured I was on the right road.

Then I re-read them all. Whew!

Needless to say, I really could have used an editor, or at least a follower with a complete high-school education in compositional writing. Me, all I was was the the fountain, the conduit for these (what I felt were) brilliant ideas designed to rid modern society of its unpleasantness. I was NOT an English major, so it was surprising to me that I could string a series of sentences together to make a rational thought.

Rational, yes. Interesting, no.

I began to look for reasons to blame for my failure. Had I started writing too late in life? College is a distant memory for me. Had I spent too much time in frivolous endeavors-- chasing tail, partying and wanton drug use? Have I burnt my brain to the point that subtlety became an impossible goal for me?

Or was I never that smart to begin with?

Introspection is a vicious bitch of a friend, let me tell you.

So I dropped off the face of the virtual planet for a couple of months and went on a vision quest (of a sort) to find my inner voice, my soulful muse. I stopped writing. I sat and thought. I read.

And I came to a conclusion. Drumroll, please.

No drumroll? Oh, okay. I forgot I'm alone here. The end result of my internalization was a list of improvements which would help me pen sentences others want to read.

• First on my list is volume. I needed to write more. Like cracking my knuckles before playing an instrument, I needed rehearsal. Practice.

• Second is quality. Not only should I write more, but the sonnets I produced needed to be better. More gripping, more interesting, smarter. Logical.

• Third is feedback. How will I know if my end product has any of those attributes without receiving real criticism from a quorum of my peers?

• Fourth is exposure. I needed to read more, and dare I say it, steal more. No plagiarism! Not that kind of stealing. I needed to break down the components of an already gripping story and follow the same architecture with my own, sort of like hearing a blues tune and writing one of my own in the same blues style.

• Fifth is a different kind of exposure-- where I experience firsthand the issues that represent to me the failure of our social arrangement. I'm talking road trip... walkabout. Watching the destruction of America from within is a good start, but to get a visceral sense of it all I must be right up in the face of it. I've never even been hungry, such is my life of shielding.

• Sixth and most difficult is commitment. My life has to be ordered in such a fashion that it facilitates the forming of meaningful parables.

• Seventh (and impossible) is background. I have to BE the man who would write a treatise like the Aden Codex. Like a guru on a mountaintop or a monk committed to silence, I must become the person who would ostensibly pen an opus like that.

When an author comes onto a talk show we hear about his 'credentials' and can nod wisely at them-- "She was a teacher and had the background to write a book about learning disabilities" -- "He was a lifelong chef and so wrote a cookbook of delectable recipes" -- "She was a prostitute and of course wrote a book about politics" -- that sort of thing.

I don't have the qualifications which support me as a philosophical thinker. Right now Jon Stewart might introduce me this way: "He wrote a heady discourse on the remodeling of American society, which makes perfect sense since he spent his working life as a carpenter and his off hours as an addict of cheap network television."

Yeah, that's not gonna fly.

So knocking around for a couple of months without writing so much as a shopping list was my solution to being a sub-par writer.

Actually, that was just step one, wherein I kicked myself daily for being a self-assured idiot.

Step two, as well as all the other steps, are in the process of occurring. I'm joining a writing support group. Some people have warned me against this-- they feel a support group made up of failed writers will just enhance my ability to be a failed writer. Maybe so, but I want to check it out for myself. At least there I can see what NOT to do.

Step three is to submit my finest short story to as many publishers as I can. I don't care if it ends up gracing the pages of 'Preschool Weekly'... it is a confidence-building exercise I can hang on my wall, like the first dollar I ever made.

It may turn out that I'm not an 'Utne Reader' type of author. Maybe I'm just a 'Weekly Reader' writer. Step four would be to determine which of those I actually am. There might be a bright future for me in the children's book section. I just hope it's the future where I am writing them, not just alphabetizing the shelves (I forget... does 'T' come before or after '§'?).

Regardless of any way that this fallout occurs, prepare yourself in the coming months for a slew of short posts from me. Rather than write stories you would rather not read (as I've been doing in the past), I'll be concentrating on creating a reality commentary that you would rather not read. With any luck somewhere in the middle of this all there should be a subtle change to my output.

A change for the better, I'm hoping. Wish me luck.

Copyright 2010 Bruce Ian Friedman