The truth is often harsh and unpleasant, I know. Funny how that doesn't seem to stop me from telling it. Partially due to the fact that your feelings don't matter to me, and partially because most people need a rude awakening here and there over the course of their lives. Allow me to be the one to rattle your cage. Many folks out there aren't even aware when they suck, and they should be. Clogging up my eyeballs with sub-par drivel pisses me off. Reading is something I enjoy immensely and do with great fervor. Opportunities to read must be created, they won't plop themselves in your lap. We are a very busy generation of people and often, do not make the time to just relax with a good book anymore. When I was a child, and even a teenager, I surrounded myself with books, making frequent trips to the Maspeth Library. Returning, renewing, and checking out new books, usually five or six at a time, brought me more joy than to most of my friends, and I knew that. They lacked the ability to lose themselves in the world of fiction, into typed pages about another state, country, or world. Books transported me across time and space and allowed me to escape my inner demons for hours at a stretch.
These days it seems everyone's a writer, or so they think. Putting your thoughts out there for others to read is not writing, not always. More often than not, it's journaling. Remember keeping a private journal when you were younger? Maybe yours had a lock, mine did. Kept under the bed or tucked deeply in a drawer, we used this book to inscribe our innermost thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Sometimes, it was a place to chronicle our day. A place to complain, whine, moan, or even shed quiet tears over heartbreak, our diaries kept our secrets in confidence and listened intently to our woes without judgement. Maybe you wrote poetry on those pages, expressing yourself in a way that couldn't be uttered aloud. The name of your current crush written in your fanciest script with hearts and stars peppering the spaces around it, and perhaps your first name and his last name, just testing it out...all found within the sacred pages read by no one but you. Modern technology has replaced the little book with the tiny lock and key. We have access to endless forms of online journals and ways to record our every thought.
The question is, should we? More specifically, should YOU? If you are using online media that is private and can only be accessed by you, then I say, do it. Typing is faster and easier, and face it, you can even edit yourself, fix errors, add photos, and art to jazz it up. I am all for using technology, taking an easier path, using what is now readily available to us. When you make the decision to allow your every thought to become public, you are opening up a can of worms that can never be closed. Once you've put something out there into internet-land, it follows you forever. It can never be erased, and that should be one huge reason to journal privately. Opinions you have today won't be the same next year. Hell, they may not be the same next week. Someone you can't stand today may be your best friend tomorrow. That may be the same person for some of you. In love, out of love...all permanently there for me and God to read. Of course, you do realize you are opening up your life to intense scrutiny, don't you? Whether I want to or not, after reading your blather about basically nothing, I am judging you, harshly.
Another valid reason to keep your journal private or on actual paper, is that when you write about your day to day bullshit, using flowery, strained terminology, you start to sound like your twelve year old self. How this makes me feel, why I love him, who do I see in the mirror today? Cute when you're in middle school, pathetic when you're middle aged. Information that no one needs or wants, you insist upon filling us up with absolute brain dead babble. Of course, couple the constant online waxing poetic about your day with letting us all know how your kid did the cutest thing today and that's what makes motherhood worthwhile amid all the dirty diapers and spit up, and I come *this* close to bashing your skull in with a hammer. Those of us past that point in our lives find no point in reliving those days, much less reading about it in vomitous amounts. Your glamorization of baby puke is reprehensible and does other potential new parents no favors when they read about it. If you are going to share with the world, let the truth hang out like fucking dog balls or keep it under wraps.
I feel that it's time to insult some folks, and no better time than the present. Just because you CAN write, doesn't mean you should. By can, I simply mean you have mastered the mechanics of putting a pen to a piece of paper or the more modern version, typing on a keyboard and making words pop up on a screen. Trained monkeys can do that, ask Jane Goodall. The question is, can you write? If the answer truly is yes, then start a blog or write an article for your local newspaper or magazine. But, is the answer really yes? Can you tell a story and hold someone's interest for more than 2 minutes? Are you able to make words sing? When you write, are you creating something new, or presenting a fresh view no one has ever even contemplated until they've read your words? Or do you read other's work and attempt to re-work it, poorly and falsely call it your own? Maybe you think that beating the shit out of a dead horse on a topic that has been written about, had movies of the week made about, photo montages published on, and songs heard on the radio regarding, is the way to catch a reader's interest. Unless you can present it in a fashion I've not considered before today, you've lost me within the first seven words. That's honesty in all its glory.
So, I'll pose the question again. What makes you think you can write? The fact is, most people cannot write well. And, the flip side of that coin, is most people believe they can. Using ten-letter words inappropriately and attempting to be poetic is not only bad writing, but it should embarrass you. I'm embarrassed for you when I read work that clearly has not been properly edited and appears as though the you were trying so hard, you popped out a couple of hemorrhoids. If you aren't sure what good writing looks like, pick up a book. Great writers are avid readers. I don't mean trashy novels, nor do I mean biographies or autobiographies about Hollywood icons. Good fiction writers should inspire you. They should have the ability to mentally remove you from your present and plop you right down in the middle of their created world, among the characters to whom they've birthed. If your writing doesn't pull me in, suck me out of my chair and into the beauty and wonder of your written word, you suck.
Blog posts need not be pages and pages long, filled with nonsense fillers and a whole lot of nothing. They do have to contain real meat. Real meat is not written during your ten minute break. It isn't even begun during your 30 minute lunch break. If you aren't spending at least an hour on your content, don't expect me to spend more than 25 seconds scanning it for points of interest, and not move on when I don't find any. Moving a reader to tears, to rage, to pee their pants, to see something in a whole new light, that's the goal. You won't reach that goal when you pop out a post like most people pop out a Tweet or a text. When I read someone's work, I'm waiting for that overwhelming need to write to them and either let them know how their words touched me in some way or how they fucking rubbed my ass the wrong way. If you've neither received fan mail nor hate mail, you've failed. Personally, I think you've done a bang up job when the hate mail flows in...it means you hit a nerve. That takes talent, and frankly, I don't see a hell of a lot of it out there.
This may seem hypocritical of me to write about this in such a harsh and judgmental manner. Some of you are already shaking your heads, pointing your fingers, and tsk tsk-ing me for picking on other writers. In all likelihood, all of you doing just that, don't write. Who better to figuratively flog these people than another writer? I'm not a lab rat or rocket scientist, with all the passive detachment and necessary objectivity it takes to perform those jobs. What I do here, the place from which it comes, qualifies me at least slightly to form these opinions over the average Joe. So, take it like a man, really absorb what I've said, and make the right choice. If you read your work, and it sounds like something straight out of a diary, make it private and spare me. My time is worth something. Conversely, if others have read your work and told you how much they want to shove a sharp object through your eyeball because you've struck a nerve and made them consider a side to a story they've never wanted to before, then allow me to shake your hand. Join me in the writer's club and let's knock 'em dead! If not, if your writing sounds more like a desperate tween trying to be noticed, then for fuck's sake STOP! Are you friggin kidding me right now???
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