The Writer

I can extrapolate from the Rum Diaries, Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, and from my own personal experience that a writer's own worst critic is always himself. Cursing his self-seen inability to create, he'll pity himself in the most prosaic of ways in voice or in text, but never only to himself.

Writers self pity. I do too, I can't avoid that charge. I find my lack of production highly pitiable. I'm thirty years old since December, and all I've ever officially put out were a few video game reviews and a column in my short-lived high school paper.

Realizing that, though, is a step in the right direction. Like recovering alcoholics will tell you, the first step is to admit that you have a problem.

The question then arises: can you be a great writer without that stripe of self-pity? Can you become a novelist or any other kind of creator of fiction without sitting down from time to time and looking at yourself and saying "you're worthless" ?

I understand now what Stallone meant when he said "you shoulda seen me." Sometimes, and this happens in every profession, you hit on something genius, something great, a brilliant innovation, or a work of art. It could be something as obscure as a literary-quality lab report, or something as mundane as the perfect parallel-parking job; these and millions of other events on a day-to-day basis fall into the category of unacknowledged greatness. A flash of grandeur alone in a jungle with no memory.

This is why I've decided that today, I will never again hate myself for my lack of product. I will instead spin this void, I will apply a PR-slant. Without further ado:

I wasn't not producing. I was building a catalog of experience to vitalize my work.

After all, you can't really be great if you don't know what shit is, can you?