“You need an adventure,” he said to me, and I knew he was write.

(OK, he was ‘right’. But I meant the word in both senses of how it sounds when spoken.)

Does an apparent mistake like that make you uncomfortable when you read it?

Poets use these kind of auditory puns all the time because they help create rhyme and scan. But  I love it when a writer helps me challenge my expectations a little by throwing in an outrageously cheap pun like that.

It works because I choose my adventure to be this one–to write. And I’m answering the opening statement, in an unconventional way. What do you think? Have I gone too far? I’ve got some high quality support lined up in my defence:

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
(Helen Keller)

so,

Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind.
(Jack Kerouac)

If words existed first in speech, long before they were ever written down, isn’t it more important to consider the way we hear them when they’re spoken than how we spell them when we write?

Maybe it’s the poet in my soul, but I can only write when I can hear the words as they would be spoken. I write lines of prose that have internal rhythm and often incorporate rhyme. But sometimes I wonder if readers will even pick up on this. Because we all read differently.

Our first topic on my undergrad degree at the University of Birmingham was “What is Reading?”, and after 12 weeks of lectures and seminars I’m sure I was little the wiser. But I do know how I read, and what I like.

And for all that I’ve read about ‘audiences’ (or ‘markets’ in business… because it means exactly the same thing) I can only make judgements based on my preferences and how I read.

Someone somewhere on the web once published something that said blog readers don’t like long posts. What did I do with that information? For a long time, I kept it in mind, and attempted to keep my posts short/er.

Maybe I managed to shave two hundred words off the odd nine-hundred word post once or twice. Hey, I even managed to produce a four-hundred word post one day! Hurrah.

But it seems it is my natural proclivity to be garrulous, verbose. Short posts will come, from time to time, but the long ones form the backbone of my style and how I write. As I’m staking out my claim upon authenticity as a writer, I need to be true to my form as much as I can.

Publish and be damned (I say, again). Resist the urge to edit and delete too much. Is this a popularity test or a naked and shameless pursuit of my art?

No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge.
(Jack Kerouac)

My partner and I often have this debate about what audiences want,

“They want short and pithy–something they can make sense of at a quick glance, and pull the main points from readily.”

“No they don’t. Morons want ‘short’ because they have the attention span of a gnat. Sensible, intelligent readers will spend longer reading high quality content.”

And in truth, we’ve each argued on both sides of this fence (though he will deny it, I’m sure), which seems to prove us both inherently flawed in our nonsensical minds. He tells me to write shorter posts, and I point to his 4-page volumes of unrestrained rambling with steam shooting out of my ears.

Perhaps the answer should be, just write what you want, like Kerouac said. You know you can’t please all the people all of the time, so why try? It may be enough to please two happy readers today, and then put my feet up for a rest (and this is assuming I’ll even get two!).

But this brings me to more uncomfortable questions for a writer, in fact, the biggest one I know:

How badly do you want to be popular?

Would you carry on writing for years on end, if you thought that no-one was reading your stuff? Would Rowling have pursued Years 5, 6 & 7 at Hogwarts, if Years 1-4 hadn’t been such a success? (If you’re wondering about that, take a look at Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address on the Fringe Benefits of Failure.)

And wouldn’t people have thought her a little  insane to do so at the expense of living a ‘normal’ life? Because spending day after day writing something that perhaps will not change the world is surely an abnormal way to live.

This is the artist’s eternal dilemma. You may feel that your art is trivial, that it will not change the world. You may fear that no-one will buy it and you’ll never make any money from this path. And you may fear that you are wasting your time when you should be doing something far more sensible. You say these things to try to keep your ego in check.

But you also have to believe in the terrible necessity of doing your art. It is vital to you to write, to paint, to stitch or shoot pictures, or do whatever you will do that allows the creative impulse within you to find it’s own true and most beautiful form of expression.

It is vital to you, because if you don’t do it, everything else begins to fall down around your ears, to collapse. And so your art becomes something you must defend fiercely with your ego, and it becomes something of great ego importance nonetheless.

A more uncomfortable question for a writer might be, how far will you go to defend the pursuit of your art? To mark out the time that you need in order to write, when others around you are pressing upon you the need to be sensible or do something else.

Recently I took a very bold step. Something that most bloggers would consider just crazy. I turned off my comments, for good. Too late now. No going back–I’ve said it and it’s here in black and white as testimony to the fact.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole practice of commenting on blogs. Mostly, it comes down to the fact that I’m a bit snooty about my art and I want this space to be pure, distinctive, untouched by idle chit-chat or vain applause.

But there’s a bigger and better reason why, as a writer with a serious dream of being published, I would counsel you to turn off your comments too. Simply this–it’s too easy to allow your comment activity to become your validation for why you write (and if you mostly write through a blog, read this as ‘why you blog’ too).

And it’s too easy to fall into the trap of believing that you are writing to please your Followers. If you get sucked into thinking like this, it will get in the way of finding your authentic writer’s voice. In the end, you will only be writing for the applause. Like those tired old bands that reform years later to go on tour (I never could understand why anybody went to see them).

Those Problogger and Copyblogger types will tell you that you need comments to increase your Google ranking. Blah blah blah. I say, if you’re writing with only Search Engine Optimization in mind, then go ahead, but your writing won’t be authentic and distinctive and the brilliant expression of your true creative self. I know which I’d rather be.

It’s true we often feel that we need validation, and as a solitary artist or writer, it can be very difficult to fulfil that need from within. If you hope to flourish, it seems to me that you just can’t work in total isolation. The essential kit-list for all would-be artists begins with two things: a Muse and a Believing Mirror.

Of course, it doesn’t just end there. One needs material and observations of the world to write about. If you’ve read The Artist’s Way, you’ll know that Cameron talks about this as the importance of “filling the well”.

On a coffee date with an old friend last week, I told her I was feeling in need of an adventure–something to offer my inner artist to feed upon and make exciting new art with. I’ve been living a dull life of duty and obligation for a long time now, with little spice or spontaneity.

I was rather surprised by her response, that the Brontes lived all their lives in the same house and still found a deep creative well to draw from in the production of their art. She’s right, of course. But I don’t care for her point much.

Far more importantly, I feel that it’s necessary to ask yourself what sort of adventure you seek in life.  I do believe that writing is an adventure, and the Writer’s Road, when pursued with a picaresque flair, can take you in all sorts of exciting and new directions.

This may be an uncomfortable truth to face. But I’m not prepared to settle for anything less, at least not on a monday like this.

{no comments and no subheadings today, just stream-of-consciousness ideas, and love and respect to Sterne and Kerouac, for all that I’ve learned from them along the Writer’s Road}