Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Wednesday, July 13, 2005. So what I do is just admit my fear. Look at this gap in time: days since the last Brick, feels like a month. Why? A lack of topics as well as a lack of opinions?
No.
It was the feeling of a block. It came from the insight that as the number of reader “hits” on the Brick increase, the pressure to excel increases.
That’s odd, for me, because my pressure to excel always has been largely internal. I am my harshest critic. I would say toughest editor, too, but it is tough to spot the bad comma or awkward phrase I forgot to delete. When I finally do, or it’s pointed out by others, the harshest critic steps in.
But knowing more and more folks are dropping by is scary. This seems hypocritical. Why am I posting, why pay fees to a Web service except to be out there?
The morning’s KUAF-FM trivia quiz revealed a small minority people want to be the center of attention. I say, admit to want to be the focus. My guess is that nearly everyone craves it, but morals and humility stops it, as does shyness. Those don’t stop the desire.
I have lots to say and, I like to think, interesting ways of expressing those thoughts. Simultaneously, shyness and lots of subtler conflicting emotions creep in.
I would like to think all writers and artists have that to varying degrees, and the more successful ones overcome bashfulness or societal prohibitions.
A couple of years ago at a poetry reading on the Fayetteville campus, the well-known speaker asked the audience, “Who here is a writer?” I sure wasn’t going to raise my hand. I haven’t made much money writing. I haven’t written much, either, by some vague standard. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to be a writer yet.
But a favorite neighbor was sitting next to me. Her husband by any standard is a Writer, capitalized. She grabbed my arm and raised it for me.
“Well, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose so,” I replied, then held up my arm without her help.
What I am sometimes is mediocre, but, no writer is always at his best, Maugham more or less said.
When I review my essays I see I repeat myself, but most thinkers actually have just a few themes. All I’m doing is developing themes that keep on coming up because they are favorites, not necessarily deliberate choices, either.
By risking mediocrity and repeating anecdotes and opinions, one thing that comes up is originality.
I prefer my own thoughts, risking quality and novelty, to those of others. I don’t have it in me to deliberately copy or plagiarize.
The use of “deliberately” is deliberate. As a writer I read, listen and watch widely. My wife can tell you I don’t forget much. That stuff gets absorbed. Maybe I refine or refute it and it becomes by common standards original. Some concepts inevitably stick in me intact. Just as inevitably I will spit them out, forgetting their sources, thinking them unique.
That’s when editors come in handy, not to mention my ol’ harshest critic. -30-
