Thinking about starting a blog. Seeing if this one still works.

I have a funny relationship with writing, y’all. I wanted to be a writer (and a rock star, and a poet) in high school. I wrote a decent amount, some on typewriter, some on computer, some in notebooks. Not a tremendous amount, and none of it was any good, and unfortunately my inner critic silenced my inner artist instead of spurring them to greatness.

I think there are a number of poisonous things that a young artist can believe, and unfortunately I believed a great many of them. I believed that brilliance didn’t need to be developed; that one was born brilliant, and their abilities were largely static. This sounds perhaps a bit absurd. I don’t really know how to explain it other than to say that I didn’t really understand the concept of practice, because no one I ever knew practiced anything.

I believed that artists had to be wholly original to be legitimate. Artists whose influences were too visible in their product were compromised. There was no room for artistic conversation. I was in competition with every other writer who had ever lived. I must be the most sensitive, the most discerning, the most eloquent, the most devious, the most polished, the most amusing, the most thrilling, the most exciting, the most prolific.

I would be the writer who had been around the block, published in every small college journal and men’s magazine, whose books were printed on cheap brown paper and were thin and easily digestible. I would be the writer who blew into the literary scene as an enfant terrible, who tore through penthouses in Manhattan and clubs in Ibiza, and then became a recluse, publishing only intermittently, peering out suspiciously. I would be the writer taught in universities, in literature classes, alongside Steinbeck and Hemingway and O’Connor and Morrison. I would be the writer at red carpet events for my movies.

My visions grew grander still. I would write a fictional encyclopedia, a fictional bible, create an entire world. A valley of so many miles by so many miles, three towns, rivers, farms, streets, roads, neighborhoods, mines, museums, geology, ancient history, post-Columbian history, modern history, contemporary characters. Ongoing drama between the mayor’s family and (one of) the main character’s. Shadowy pasts. A psychedelic apocalypse. People transcending the limitations of humanity.

There’s an interesting dynamic where an idea becomes an obsession. I think creative people are in an economic or thermodynamic relationship with our ideas. You invest some time and effort into an idea, and the idea creates inspiration, I think. It inspirits us. And we can sing about the idea and about all the ornaments we can hang on the branches of that idea. It becomes a goose that lays golden eggs, a seed for a crystal.

But an idea can become malignant. It can take the time and effort you give it, and demand only more. You aren’t hanging ideas on a tree anymore. You’re just moving existing ones around, sometimes losing them, losing bits of each. The more you handle them, the more you see your fingerprints in the paint, the more smudges there are, the more of them you drop and break. Eventually you’re left with nothing but a vision of your creative spirit as a vast, empty desert, salt and wind and dust.

I was so bitter when I used ChatGPT the first time. I had spent so many hours staring at a computer screen, and that counts 1) trying to learn things, 2) trying to get the computer to do things, 3) trying to write things. Suddenly I was having a conversation with a token predicting machine that seemed to know everything I’d ever heard of and in far greater detail, that could spit out a few hundred lines of code in seconds that would take me hours to write, and that could write pages of prose that would take me days to write.

But that was already 13-14 years after I gave up on writing, though.

It was a cycle of drafting, iterating on the basic concept, without ever actually writing much prose. Trying to find a perfect structure, something crystalline and geometrical, something that revealed the order of the universe. To align things, to have a golden path that I could walk to literary greatness. With the perfect structure, my masterpiece was a fait accompli. Writing any given chapter would be like filling in the blanks. I couldn’t possibly fuck it up with my weak prose.

Each time I rethought everything, I got less and less out. The idea had shot its wad, as my grandmother would say.