If you or someone you know is considering being a writer, tell them to stop. Don’t do it, unless you really feel a compelling need.
That’s what other writers have told me.
This isn’t a job complaint. The Enterprise is a great place to do community journalism. But we’re reporters. You read The Enterprise for factual information, presented in a straight-forward, easy to understand manner.
You don’t read these pages seeking blazes of syntactical glory.
For that, you turn to those who have become Napoleon on St. Helena, but they’re in self-imposed exile. No one’s deposed them and sent them away.
You get your laptop computer, a CD and headphones, and enter another world, one word, one letter, one keystroke at a time, on your way to a novel, non-fiction work, poem, short story, children’s book, etc.
It’s the loneliest craft.
For however long you’re in the trance, you’re an underground radio station program director and confirmed bachelor having a series of bizarre dates. You’re 17 and a senior in high school in the late ’80s pursuing a punk rock dream in a hostile desert town. You’re a Puerto Rican soccer player cavorting in various European leagues.
You can see the rooms they’re in, the skies they walk under, the people they talk to. This despite the fact you might be in a non-corporate coffee house full of people you never make eye contact with.
You’re everything but yourself, yet you are yourself.
You live vicariously through your characters, even if some of their experiences are loosely based on your own life.
You’re dancing in the playground of the mind.
You have total control of a universe.
And it can be a waste of time. There’s no guarantee that anything you write will ever get published.
It can be tough to relate to those whose lives revolve around so-called reality TV shows, mainstream pop culture, mores of celebrity and inevitable small talk.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.
You wonder if their life is better. Then you realize you’re aiming at something more substantial, more enduring and personal. It’s a powerful lure, a seductive escape, the prospect of literary immortality.
Shakespeare’s long gone, but “The Merchant of Venice” is still around.
Jack Kerouac’s dead, but we still have “The Subterraneans” and “On The Road.”
Chuck Palahniuk’s gonna be a goner someday, but Tyler Durden from “Fight Club” will live on.
The myth of a man is more enduring than his reality. For further reference see Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.
That’s the myth I’m trying to create through writing novels.
John Santana is a reporter and editor with The Enterprise Newspapers.
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