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Blogs by Erik Hare
Desperate Cry for Attention
12/12/2007 6:38:32 AM
I have been thinking about why people write.
It’s not at all obvious in many cases. Certainly, the vast majority of writing out in the world is done to convince or to inform, the latter often a form of convincing. When a church group tells the world, “We are having our Christmas food drive,” they are informing the world of the project for the purpose of getting people involved; it is an appeal to convince potential volunteers of the need. A grant is a call to elicit money from someone else. Writing to convince makes up the bulk of what is written, and the need is generally obvious enough.
When it comes to storytelling, however, the purpose is not as clear. I, personally, always write to convince because that is my wont. I’ve always enjoyed writing and learning how to get my point across to a world that I frankly don’t always understand. More recently, I decided that I had something to say to the world; my own odd perspective started to seem valid enough to warrant recruiting people to it.
The first thing I ever published was an editorial in the StarTribune newspaper explaining with piles of statistics that the current political rhetoric was nonsense and our government isn’t all that expensive in historical and relative terms. I was trying to convince. That wasn’t storytelling, but the piles of facts and figures were utterly useless to me until I wove them into a story that made sense. I was hooked. It wasn’t a big jump for this Celt to realize that the ideology I was battling was successful in part because they didn’t even bother with the facts in the first place, skipping straight to the storyline. You can convince with nothing more than a good story.
Pure fiction goes one step further most of the time, often not trying to convince anyone of anything on the surface. These are the books that people read, the movies we see, and all the other kinds of mass media that make an entertained life for us in the USofA. I suppose that this is nice work if you can get it, but when you look at the size of the slushpiles sitting on the desk of any agent or publisher it’s obvious that not many people can get this work. To make this a living requires a lot of dedication and a deep interest in reading all the right books and tipsheets on how to write your query and make your pitch and really get noticed.
To me, it seems like nothing less than a desperate cry for attention.
The process of becoming a published fiction writer is rather comical in this way, but it all makes sense when you understand that the desire to be a storyteller in the first place is nothing more than a need for attention most of the time. I wrote my only (so far) book, “Downriver”, for the purpose of reaching kids who understand the world around them far better than the people who are in charge of the world. I want young people to realize their inner power so that they can channel it into something useful and find a happy and warm place for themselves in this bizzy world. I really don’t care if it’s published by a big company other than how that increases my ability to reach my audience. Not so with most fiction writers. They want to tell stories. They are willing to go through those hoops to obtain that validation and play something akin to the lottery of big book deals.
There was a time when I honestly didn’t read anything, and I was forced to confess as much when interviewed by Hans Dekker of wordsy.com (a great site that all writers should get to know). The problem was simple: writing seemed to be grossly inadequate at expressing anything to me, and I include my own work in this. I recently picked up a project that requires me to do a lot of reading, and I found myself getting into the habit easily. These works were no desperate cries for attention. They have a point, even if one of the books has a meandering Celtic kind of point to it. I can read again. I know what it’s all about.
What put me off reading for a while wasn’t just that what we do is inadequate. The problem was realizing that everything printed by a publisher has to somehow be successful in the writer’s desperate cries for attention. All writers have their shortcomings, myself included. I’m such a hack that if you go back through these blog posts you will find at least one typo on every page, which is really unforgivable. But I’ve decided that the warts are going to stay even as I link back to old bits because I haven’t been anointed by a big publisher and damnitall, you can tell that at a glance. This isn’t a desperate cry for attention, this is my feeble attempt at making some sense out of the world. That’s convincing enough to me.
I don’t require any more validation than the hits I receive every day, and I can’t thank all of you enough just for reading my blog. Some of you have taken the time to write to me and ask probing questions or just prove me flat wrong, and I love getting every single e-mail. Some of the rest of you forward links to my blog entries on to others and nominate me for awards; that’s far more sweet and kind of you than I deserve. I only hope that my points come across well and that the moments I take from your life help you see things in a slightly different, and more illuminating way.
Thank you for being here, and thank you for helping me to see the bigger point of it all. This isn’t my own desperate cry for attention, this blog is here to make a point. Sometimes, such as with my new story “Solstice Light”, I can do it by storytelling. But as surely as enough is as good as a feast, what I get from my readers here is gratifying enough that I have no interest trying to achieve validation from people who have no interest in me, and who probably will never even like me. You all helped me to see that point, and this blog works both ways. Thank you.
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