A bunch of people have asked me about writing lately, which is odd, considering how little of it I do. And as usual, I’m reluctant to respond, because talking about writing leaves me feeling as if I’m walking a douchebag tightrope akin to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Walk… or —let’s face it— Joseph Gordon-Levitt in general. However, marijuana exists, so you get this.
I didn’t have an identifiable, coherent style until five years ago. So that means 4+ decades of… well, okay, my writing wasn’t bad by any conventional definition. My writing wasn’t even bad in the fourth grade. (I really got into the head of the Green Goblin in my college-ruled notebook fanfic.) But it was just a lot of mimicry… one day I’d write in Terry Pratchett’s voice, the next it’d be Alan Dean Foster’s, the day after that it’d be Esther Freisner’s, and on, and on.
(I’ve got a couple hundred pages of a fantasy novel I was writing at 18 that literally bounces from style to style, from chapter to chapter. It’s like it’s written by at least five different people, none of whom had yet encountered Quentin Tarantino, but all of whom would very much like him when they did.)
A series of things came together to solidify my voice as it exists today. One of the big ones was discovering Adrian Tomine in the late 2000s.
This kid a few years younger than me was a fucking genius. His observations of people, of the incidental details of their ugly humanity, were just stunning. Every single character —no matter how small— and every interaction —no matter how banal— was distinct and alive. You could feel the characters think, and learn about them without being told anything.
And just as amazing to me was his complete fucking indifference to narrative expectation. The dude did not give a shit if you wanted a scene set or people introduced. Your desire for resolution or release at the end? Yeah, fuck that, man. You got the story right from and precisely to the moment that it was real to him, and that. Was. It.
But because he knew he was going to fuck with you, because he knew he was going to make it hurt, because he knew the denial would make you groan, he invested every single line and word on every page with every bit of life he could give it. Mostly horrible, selfish, perverted life, but hey, life all the same. And that life, it turns out, is all you every really needed to begin with.
Which means that, to a degree, I didn’t so much stop the mimicry as find the voice that fit, and then start changing it. (Arguably, I’ve just welded on pieces of other influences, like I’m tricking out Mandalorian armor or putting together a Peggy Hill probot.) And I’ll concede that my modifications are probably for the worse, in many cases, but I figure a lesser thing that is more my own is still a thing worth having.
There, I’m done. Ugh. I need a shower.