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Writing Workshop Presents:
A Call to Writers by
Jack Corydon
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/user_id/jackcorydon
Opinions, opinions. Every good writer needs them. I've been capping my opinions
when not writing--to be careful not to offend people--and it's rotted my brain
into something so tame, I've found myself boring. Where's the passion? The love
and the hatred? To be passionate, you need to be opinionated. I look at a man,
and I try to describe him. He's greasy and paranoid, middle aged but wearing
cargo blue jeans and a blue Dockers shirt, possibly insecure. He hides behind
big sunglasses and a graying mustache that fans over his top lip like a
womanizing NASCAR driver's. There, that's pretty opinionated isn't it? Quite
judgmental on my part--even assuming. How do I really know what he's like? No
time to be Buddhist when writing, it's cut-throat and evil. It's raping the
clothes to get to the flesh. It's ripping the flesh to get to the bones.
Breaking the bones to eat at the heart. If you can't feast on it, who will ever
give a shit?
I was reading an abandoned novel I started a few months ago,
and I managed to get as far as ten pages before I was sick. I thought I was
growing as a fiction writer, but I might as well have been trained as a
text-book author. I've always wondered what it would be like to write for
text-books, but wondering's as far as I'd like to go. It's a skill to be able to
construct such a mix of nausea and boredom, but I'd rather my writing be the
equivalent of fine dining. I'm a glutton with a passion for bleeding meat
drowned in buttery béchamel; when I read I want to salivate, to feel sated and
yet awaken new cravings. Repeat, repeat, repeat, 'til I'm fat on rich words and
a rhythm gently crafted to slide over my tongue and down my insatiable gullet.
It's sexual, and need never be otherwise. I want to tickle my brainwaves with
fresh humor. Scrub out every instance of humdrum plaque embedded in my brain
cavity and be forced to smile in public at the very thought of the world only I
know.
But the point is, writing HAS to be new. It HAS to be pure.
The internal editors MUST be crushed in the gears of our unstoppable creative
bulldozers until their blood tantalizes us to spin out page after page of
exhilarating prose. Let the wizards of numbness amalgamate their text-book
concoctions 'til the drool rivers slither over every cold classroom desk.
Writing MUST continue to excite. Our opinions, no matter how unpopular, should
never be suppressed but nurtured and resounded, without hesitation, to the ears
of our generation. And may they reverberate onward through space and time. In
everything we do, first and above all, We Must Exist!