Andrew's Upstanding US Citizen Homepage

As someone who identifies himself as a writer, I don't do much of it. I'm quite picky when it comes to the mood, environment and inspiration under which I perform. I could refer to it as writers' block, but I like to be different. I have plenty of ideas, but my concern for doing them justice keeps me from acting on them before I'm ready. Ok, I'm a perfectionist who stifles himself by expecting too much out of his first draft. There are plenty of things that I am passionate about; enough to write about. The problem is simply presenting them in words that people will want to read. They say you should write for yourself, but if nobody ever reads it, why waste the effort? The same words run through your head, so why not just think it and be satisfied? If I write, I am writing for an audience, and I am going to fucking entertain them.

Stories are tricky for me. I've read some amazing books where the story unfolds like a brand new dress shirt. I'm not in that league. I am good with words, but the stories themselves are a completely different zone. I started off with poetry, but I quickly became annoyed with myself. I hated other peoples poetry because it seemed so simple. When you break a sentence up over 5 lines, is it a poem? When you bombard your reader with random words, is it a poem? Poetry had become so pretentious to me that I had a laundry list of things that made what I considered to be bad poetry. Repeating the same lines over and over: bad. Stream of consciousness: gag me. Description followed by seemingly unrelated theme in attempt to create stretching allegory: fuck off. To me, the only real poetry was found in structure and metaphor. William Shakespeare was my Albert Einstein. Can YOU write a fucking 3 act play in iambic pentameter?

In that sense, I have only written one good poem. I'm really proud of it, actually, but I've never been able to write anything quite like it before or since. I searched my soul for the reason why. Was it because of the emotion I poured into it? Was it because of the discipline I used to craft each line? Was it the stars aligning to present my brain with this wonderful concept and metaphor? I've stifled myself from writing poems ever since because they never have the same quality of passion, form or concept that my one good poem had. With poetry completely foiled for me, I moved on to articles.

Articles are great because you only need to break them up into paragraphs and you're fine. You can start writing on one subject, drift to various tangents in the subsequent paragraphs, and then somehow pull it all together in your conclusion. Its sorta like how this little writeup is going. This was originally supposed to be about the material I read to get inspiration to write, but look at it now! Articles also have a broader readership. Nobody reads poems. Articles can be stories, advice, reviews, reports, or speeches. I've written articles that have been read by over 100,000 people. I've been on the radio to talk about another article that I've written. That's where the readers are.

I hope that I've offended many, many poets.