Great post and funny too!
Month: March 2009
Why This Blog: Gimme Fiction
As an append to the “Why This Blog” post:
I reserve the right to use creative license anywhere I feel like throughout this site. The purpose is entertainment. Obviously it’s easier to write it from the point of view of a character I already know, which would be me, but Steve in real life and Steve in print are subtly different. As an example, one of them is a character that will never die so long as this domain is maintained. The other is a character who’s trying to write about a character. “I’m just a dude, playing a dude, who thinks he’s another dude” seems an appropriate quote from Robert Downey, Jr. via Tropic Thunder.
I don’t think anyone wants me to write about writing. I’m relatively ignorant on the subject from a formal point of view. Besides, I want to enjoy this journey too! Not pull it apart and analyze it like one of those old comedians who gets so very serious when they’re talking about comedy. Yes, creativity does take effort, but that’s not the part I want recognized. It’s all about the end result, baby. 🙂
Why this blog?
My original thought was to write an introduction piece after I cranked out three or four blogs of sufficient content and length as an example, then to explain in greater detail what I was trying to do. Like I would point my finger at the trail
behind me and exclaim, “See this is what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!” Upon reflection I think my early thoughts as captured on the About This Blog page already sum it well but I’d like to give more detail…
I’m a pretty creative person and visually oriented in how I think and understand the world. I am not necessarily arty, I have some talent but I don’t really have all the skills for most kinds of art. I DO have a better eye for photographic composition but that recent development is exceptional.
I am at times driven by a need to exercise this creativity. To express it outside of myself. Given that I have limited visual art abilities writing seems like the easy answer. But what to write about?
More than ten years ago if you’d asked me for the current status of my life I could probably give a concise answer. I’d probably leave out details and just focus on what was making me happy or not. Then along about my mid 30’s I developed the ability to kind of take a step back from myself and explain things that happened to me more as stories or at minimum as observed jokes. Maybe it was Seinfeld that led me here and I owe something to Larry David? 😉
Years fly by life stuff happens, if you’re lucky, and here I am: on the other side of a divorce that moved at a grindingly slow crawl thanks to the court system, not the participants, and as the father of an absolutely incredible kid.
All kids are incredible. Given that we know what the, usually, fun steps are to create one it still astounds me that a brand new person can be the end result. If I was an alien I’d be quite perplexed, “You do this and you get THIS?” 🙂
So, I’ve lived and have the resultant baggage to show for it. Baggage being the summation of experiences of a person who’s lived. Circular definition, see? I forget who said this, “It’s not that you have baggage to carry, it’s how well you carry it”, but it’s what I am trying to live by.
Marrying the need to write and having my own life as source material technically makes things easy. I say technically, because if done wrong one way you end up with tell-alls that offend people, if done another way you have boring stories. The challenge I’ve set forth for myself is to create interesting short stories based on current or recent events in my life with as little fiction as possible. I think I’m pretty settled on format at the moment which is a little rambling but fun to write as seen in this piece.
Here’s another fine way an experience can be told. 🙂
In addition to being fun I’m hoping I can learn through the course of this work to carry my baggage a bit better. Thus ends my third ever post.
Honey, I don’t feel so well… blaaaaaahhhg
I think the term “blog” stinks. It sounds like it doesn’t belong in an English dictionary and it makes me cringe every time I here it. How about “bjournal”? Ok, ok, that stinks too, but I’d like to think that the high quality online dialogue output I’ve been seeing is much more than the static Web Log from the early days. At the very least it’s real Op/Ed. So, how about “BOp/Ed”? 😉
Maybe it’s no longer necessary to point out whether something is online only, especially as some more established channels, newspapers, are moving solely to a web presence. I guess one question is, when is a blogger (ugh) a journalist and vice-versa? I’m sure the newspaper folks will want to retain some kind of distinction for marketing purposes.
Any thoughts on a new term?