“Bad art is tragically more beautiful than good art because it documents human failure”

The first time I heard that, I laughed uncontrollably. That’s how I like to think of my “art”, as failures. I never quite get what I want out of it. With writing, I hate how I can’t articulate, and with drawing and painting, I never can quite create the image in my head. With drawing and such, I realize that one has to practice in order to accomplish anything…and I don’t. Haha. So it is understandable that I can’t draw for shit sometimes. With writing, however, I have no such excuse. I write more often than anything else, I breathe writing, day in, day out. It’s a constant in my life, because it allows me to forget where I am and centralize myself around one thing, whether it be writing a useless entry about how I’m feeling, or writing a story. I read other people’s stories, normal people, mind you—not famous authors or poets—and can’t help but want to strangle myself for not being able to pull that calibre of writing from my own brain.

A friend said to me once that my characters are too angry, and that she hated my main character. I thought that statement was sort of funny…it hurt a little, but the sadist couldn’t help but find the irony hilarious. I have the problem of projecting myself into who I’m writing. It’s an urge that I never seem to be able to completely ignore. Every time I write a character, whether I like them or not, they are almost alwaysgiven a piece of myself. With my main characters, there are admittedly several…ahem…similarities between them and myself. My main character in my novel for instance…the one my friend hated…I don’t know how much more obvious I could have made it. You hate my character, you hate me. That was why I laughed. My character shows the side of myself that I hide from the world, and captures the very few traits that I happen to like about myself.

Writing is like a field full of mines. There are so many things I used to avoid talking about, so many characters that never sprouted because I was worried what others would think of them. I found myself writing a very odd story the other day, one I plan to NEVER let anyone else read. The characters are different from many of the others I have written. For some reason, every time I sit down to type a paragraph or two, I end up with pages of writing without even meaning to. I don’t have to think about what I’m writing; it’s just there…as though it has always been. I tap into it, and I write. I don’t worry about plot, this story is purely for character development. And that’s the conclusion I’ve come to as well: I am not the entirely plot driven author with the somewhat bland characters. My stories are completely focused in character and little else, that is my weakness. I make myself imaginary friends…people who seem real to me. I lose myself in it so much, that I forget sometimes that these people aren’t real. They are more a part of my life than anyone else…I guess because they are incapable of harming me unless I will it.

You only get better through practice, that much is clear. I think I just need to stop trying so hard and allow the words to come to me rather than bashing in my skull in a vain attempt to get them out. If it takes 6 months to get out a chapter, so be it.