Write Writers Write!

Hopes and Dreams

You too will meet your fate.  All suns will set on your finite vision.  For now, in the sunrise of your youth your dreams must be your highest hope.

Before I start a day of writing, I peruse the New York Times reviews of books - and this allows me to tap into the rage that lies hidden and dormant within me like a tumor of magma.  I wonder to myself, why did these individuals find publishers?  How did they catch the eye of an agent to publish their works, which seem so mired in the present that they are the dead and dessicated skeletons of dreams and visions, but not dreams themselves.

What I am trying to say is that most of what is out there, is boring.  Perhaps it documents the profound boredom and nihilism of Modern Day America.  Perhaps it trades on pat notions of morality and the good life.  Perhaps it toys with “good” and “evil” and doesn’t realize that they do not exist, even as value judgments.  They are empty.  When you write a story where the reader cannot discern whether characters are “good” or “evil” but merely human, they will tell you that you have chilled them to their core.  You have forced them to think about themselves.  They do not sit in judgment on a pedestal, you have reduced them to their naked humanity.  This is the essence of horror.  We exist not in a black and white world of friend and enemy, but in a world full of color.  And the colors have no purpose but through the observer.  But what I say hearkens back to tales of today.  Tales about unwitting terrorists.  Tales about evil terrorists and heroic counter terrorism teams.  Historical period pieces set in turn of the century Vienna.  The Vietnam War.  Vampires in love.  Cute Puppies.  Children with crack pipes.

The Vietnam War is as dead and buried as the over 65,000 brave young men who bled and died there in the jungles.  However, the National Book Award Winner for 2008 was a story set in its jungles.  I think the Vietnam War literature reached its high point with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. It was written before major US invovlement and predicted the hubris and arrogance which would lead to our “defeat” there.

The Iraq War is as dying as slow a death in the American Consciousness.  It has receded to back page blurbs.  Afghanistan, the war that was forgotten in the height of the Bush Administration’s war fever for Iraq, has proceeded straight into the front pages.  Pakistan has been destabilized by the Afghani militants pouring across its borders.  This will be a recurring cycle for the next fifty years.  We will go to Afghanistan, Iraq will implode.  We will be called to stabilize Iraq.  Afghanistan will implode.  Congratulations gentlemen, you have created your next self perpetuating war.  This one will not be cold.  And I look forward to fighting it.

Iraq.  Never in the history of warfare, has a populace been more shielded from the effects of a war that they perpetuated. You can blame President George W. Bush for Iraq, but you took part.  And you did not suffer in the least, unless one of your family members was killed in that desert swamp of the soul.

Is it possible to elicit passions anymore?  That is what you have to ask yourself.  Are you going to be writing to perpetuate the status quo, the consumer credit class, the enfranchised ideas that led this country to the brink of ruin?  Those were the happy times.  Much like a drunk at the beginning of his binge.  A giddy addict fresh from scoring.  It is time to feel some pain.  It is time to confront it head on!  March through it, bathe in it.  You will learn how to suffer like the Ancient Greeks, those champions of catastrophe and crisis.

You have to search yourself, and ask yourself - what am I doing this for?  Why do I write?  You could even write an essay about it like Ralph Waldo Emerson.  You should be able to boil the essence of your answer into one sentence.  A multifaceted gem.

Writers spend alot of time with themselves.  They are the ultimate practicioners of the one Socratic imperative - “Know Thyself”.  However many of them do not know much more besides that.

Do the world a favor and learn to find beauty in a pile of trash.  Learn to breathe it and let it flow from you mind through your fingertips.  Be a teacher and open the eyes of your fellow man.  Discover the living breathing world that many trammel on in their quest for their God, the pimp roll in their pockets.

Report on this living world.  Don’t follow the dead to their tombs.  Don’t build a framework of half truths cemented by what you think will sell in the marketplace.  I am going to tell you, if you are not creating, striving to produce works of art that will illuminate the future pathways of mankind you are a mere consumer, you are on this planet to line someone’s pockets.  That is it!

I would declare that the cultural division in America is even more stark, we are broken down into “entertainers” and “the entertained.”  The entertainers create entertainment which the entertained talk about.  They speak  Athletes, writers, actors, video game producers, device producers, consumables producers, music producers, singers, songwriters…..

They produce framework through which we see the world.  They produce the devices through which we play our entertainment.

Did you hear they were coming out with a new storage medium that could store the entire canon of Western Civilization on a single disk?

Did you hear they made a movie which poked so many holes in the internal logic of the Bible that it collapsed and was in need of replacement?

Did you hear they made a machine which induces an instantaneous orgasm?  The need for companionship has dissolved!

We all have it in us to tell stories.  It is what we have been doing since we descended from the trees and took to caves.  If we did not tell each other stories the world would seem like so much eating, being eaten, struggling, breeding, and dying.  The existence of an animal, no different than the bear in the woods.  This is our base level.  Do you not understand that we create our own meaning, humans?

I have chosen my reason for being.  I have been sharpening my intellect.  I have accorded my will to my purposes.  I have no fear.  You should not either.  Write writers write!

Jeffrey M. Hopkins is the author of Broken Under Interrogation, the American Dream laid bare.