Title, of course, based on this song :

Been pondering that question of self-expression versus fitting in lately.

I’ve always been ferociously myself. Even as a kid, I instinctively rebelled against anything that I felt confined my right to expressing who I am, crazy smart brain and all. And to this day, when I contemplate dialing back on the smart talk and learning to keep it in check in order to get along, a very strong voice inside me screams “FUCK YOU! I am who I am and that’s it! I’m a five dimensional peg and I refuse to have two of my dimensions sanded off in order to fit in your square fucking hole! If you can’t handle that, that’s YOUR problem, motherfucker!”

And the thing is, in the eyes of an individualistic culture, that’s the right answer. Lots of people would applaud my insistence on being who I truly am, consequences be damned. Modern individualist cultures say that’s a perfectly fine thing to do, and that society should just back off and let me be myself.

But the thing is, I’m lonely.

Being a loner leads to loneliness. An inability to compromise is never a good thing when it’s a subject as broad as personal identity. I mock and deride conservatives for their inflexibility of mind, but am I really so different? Surely there’s some kind of compromise towards being understood (and not getting those dreaded blank stares) that I could live with.

Not everything I have to say needs to be a scintillating, coruscating expression of my inner essence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with small talk. Sure, it’s not what I want or prefer, but so what?

It all comes down to how badly I want to fit in and connect and not feel like an alien any more. On some level, I suppose, I am waiting to find the milieu in which I feel comfortable without having to dumb myself down or otherwise suppress my true self. And it’s a great dream, but I am not sure how realistic it is. Maybe that’s just an excuse to indefinitely postpone having to grow up enough to get along with others. Maybe I need to learn to bend a little towards being social and learning to read a situation deeply enough to keep up with the herd.

Maybe I would be happy if I was less of a maverick and more of a well behaved cow.

Because the thing is, my social paradise might not exist at all. That I wouldn’t fit in without compromise amongst the brainiest people in the world. Or the most creative, or the funniest, or whoever. I still hold out hope that comedy writers, and TV people in general, will be my kind of people. But they might not be, and I have to face that.

And there’s still this barrier between me and others that makes my responses a little slow and my aim with my jokes and comments to be terrible. It’s like trying to paint through smoked glass.

And now we change subject because I finally remembered what I meant to write about today.

Today, I had Advanced Story And Character (ASAC), and for the most part, I was bored.

And out of said boredom came the realization that I don’t need a lot of the instruction I get in my classes because I do it all intuitively. I don’t need to learn a method for coming up with story ideas, or help structuring a story, or instructions on how to come up with characters. For me, I often get all of that as part of the initial idea, or I get the idea and the rest comes to me immediately afterwards, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, clicking together.

Not that I am claiming to be a perfect writer. Far from it. I have so much to learn. It’s simply that the things I need to learn can’t be taught as theory.

That’s why I love having my stuff workshopped so much. I learn so much about writing in such a short period of time because other people can see flaws and weaknesses that I can’t and when I learn about them, I can feel my mind expanding and my understanding deepening. I always come away from it feeling great.

Admittedly, part of that is that I just got a large dose of the attention I crave. But not all of it!

A particular bugbear of mine came up : theme. In a nutshell, I hate theme. To me, the theme of the work is mostly something scholars come up with after the fact to make themselves seem important, and like they really “get” the writer.

But it’s bullshit. Nobody worth reading sits down with a theme in mind. Good writers tell stories. They don’t give a shit about theme. To me, getting people to think about theme before writing (or during) is putting the cart before the horse and putting the horse in backwards as well.

My prof likes to talk about how a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s work is about what it means to be a man and grace under fire. And maybe that is true… I don’t know.

But what I do know is that Hemingway never sat down at the typewriter thinking “Well, time for another story about what it means to me a man”. He sat down to write a story. If someone had told him that he had written about the same thing a lot, he would have started writing something else. Theme is nothing that the readers or the writers need worry about.

It’s strictly for English profs and their ilk to divine and contemplate and argue over. The cranky writer in me wants to shout “Stop looking up your own ass and read the fucking story!”.

So what I am saying is that I probably won’t appear on many Book TV type shows more than once.

I sometimes have something to say in my stories. But it’s not something I think about. And I don’t think any writer should.

Just write the fucking story.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.