SpiralTruth

When I was in high school, I had an English teacher that was very much against the use of “I” in writing. Perhaps because he seemed so sure of himself and I was so unsure of myself, that advice sort of stuck in my head, and I suppose it’s good advice when you’re writing high school essays. In hindsight, I think another high school English teacher gave me something much more valuable when he taught me to hate clichés. Sometimes I still use them because, overused or not, they’re the best say something, but I still hate them and agonize over them. But the “I” thing did a little more harm than good. It instilled this Catholic-like guilt in me, admonishing me to take myself out of my writing in order for it to be more persuasive. It’s also a very journalistic way of looking at the world. Journalists feel they are doing their job better by taking themselves out of the story. The problem is, it’s never true. No matter how objective a piece of writing sounds, it is always written by someone. I think that’s why I like Hunter S. Thompson so much. He saw through all that and decided to go out of his way to be in the news he was reporting. When blogs really started to take off, my aversion to “I” really kicked into gear. What I saw was a bunch of people turning stuff they’d normally write in a diary into blog posts. I had friends who would write about their lives and take literary swings at other friends, saying things that they would never say in person, all the while pretending that the people they were talking about didn’t read their blog. Then the offended person would write a rebuttal post pretending it wasn’t a rebuttal post and – well, it got pretty ridiculous. This was what I knew of blogs, and despite occasional indiscretions into the same sort of over-the-top drama posts (which I usually deleted within a few days of releasing them to the world), I did not see them as a platform for serious writing. Oh how things have changed! I decided to give blogging a serious go with “spiraltruth” because I thought it would be a good way to get used to writing often and having others read it. I also hoped to eventually learn how to make a living off of doing something that I loved if I didn’t win any of the big prizes (best-selling novel as an author or a platinum record as a musician). And I saw sites like boingboing that weren’t the “confessional” style of blog that I disliked so much and figured I might try to do something similar. Turns out that getting a following like boingboing’s and consistently being the first to get to a good story isn’t the easiest thing to do. And it also isn’t where my heart is. I enjoy experiencing other people’s art and I enjoy talking about it. But I don’t enjoy writing about it as much as I enjoy writing about what’s on my mind and trying to figure out how it fits into the grand scheme of things (arghhh! cliché). So why do it? The advice on starting a blog that got me going was: just start writing. The idea was that you’d eventually figure out what you should be writing about. I think I know where I want to go now, and I hope everyone who’s reading enjoys that direction. You still might get the odd opinion on a current event or a shout out to another artist, but I’m going to try to focus more on my own journey as an artist and try to do it in a way that might help you in your journey. In hindsight, the things that I feel most qualified to talk about are the things that seemed the most personal and that I suddenly realized were universal. So I’m going to trust in that, stop worrying about putting more of the “I” into this blog, and cross my fingers that it doesn’t turn into an emo-ish online diary…