On Writing

(So much for my life gaining a sense of danger along with a lovely art student with an air of mystery about her. See, this is what happens when I don’t carry a calculator with me at all times, I miss classic Shell Oil references. And yes, there are times during which I am not carrying a calculator. They are admittedly rare but they happen occasionally.)

Had a friend reference a recent news event in an email today that I’ve been meaning to write about. It’s the story of the eighteen year old girl with the two novel deal who has been alleged of plagiarizing someone else’s novel. I’ll still use the phrase alleged here but it was pretty clear that if she didn’t out and out copy, it was at least a huge influence.

I’m not upset about an eighteen year old getting a book deal. After walking into book stores and seeing that Nicole Ritchie and Pamela Anderson had written “novels” and that Jewel has written one of the best selling poetry collections of all time I’m pretty resigned to my fate that if I ever pull a book deal I still will be outsold by an heiress who can correctly spell her name if you spot her three vowels. I mean, I cheer Ethan Hawke for the sheer fact that I know that he actually wrote his book. So an eighteen year old getting a book deal to write a novel that is based on her life is a bit of a marketing ploy but I’ve seen worse.

It doesn’t surprise me though that she may have plagiarized and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was completely unintentional. If you read the novel that I was writing when I was eighteen (or at least the twenty pages that I completed) you would go “Wow, you are totally stealing from Kurt Vonnegut. Or more accurately Douglas Adams.” At eighteen I hadn’t lived or written enough to have made my own style and I would say that at point I was more a composite of what I had read than what I had done. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I looked back at some of my old fiction and found passages that mirrored my favorite books. At that point in time, they were more my life than my real life was.

Personally, I’ve seen my writing style evolve a bit over the years. You can still see the Douglas Adams influence, especially in the blog with the continual asides and footnotes and the complete inability to follow a “one topic to a sentence” protocol. My recent fiction has been a bit more in the surrealist tone with this dark undercurrent, mainly due to reading a lot of Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll over the past few years. Overall, compared to when I was eighteen my writing is more reflective and subdued. The humor is there, but the punchlines are a little less obvious.

The other reason why writing style has been on my mind was an article on whether or not blogs are a good thing from a writing perspective. Certainly it helps that people actually read what I write but grammar isn’t of high regard (and in my case, is often non-existent). And while I will get philosophical from time to time, most of what I write is pretty trivial. That is a change from my old writer’s journal and it is something I miss. I don’t write about work anymore and anyone who knows a thing about my real life knows that that is a huge issue in my life right now. I don’t talk about relationships and that might mean that one of the coolest things that I’ve ever done might not happen again. That is meeting someone and being able to look back at what I wrote the first time I met them. That is a private memory and I don’t know if I am storing those as well as I used to.

What does all of this mean? It means that I might as well get started on my novel, even if I could expect to lose shelf space to Ashlee Simpson. It means that I wouldn’t trust an eighteen year old to write a novel that is worth reading because you can’t tell a story worth reading without having had a life worth living. And it means that I need to find an extra thirty minutes in a week to write for myself as well as cyberspace. And find an editor, which would make life better for all involved.