well, i haven't had a blog for all that long yet, but already i am writing my first guilt post. as an avid reader of blogs, i have noticed that all bloggers, no matter how talented they are, no matter how many great ideas they have floating around in their heads, eventually get to a place where they post only out of a panicky guilt feeling. like, oh, shit, it's been so long since i posted that if i don't write something soon, all of my readers are going to abandon me! you can discern these posts by their random quality, their lack of cohesion or theme, and babbling. that's right, babbling. useless words with useless meanings that run on and on and on and on. babbling. (sigh. i just realized that my pooh post could be considered a babbling messy... thing..., which would mean that this really ISN'T my first guilt post. but i really did feel like a chubby little tubby all stuffed with fluff that day. i did.)
since this is my first guilt post, i will indulge another first, but one that will likely become the first of many given my obsessive morning reading of the new york times online edition. i am going to write for the first time about an item in the news. about a week ago, i was reading about this chick who got a $500,000 book deal as a sophomore in college. now, said chick is very privileged, and recieved her book deal because of some quality networking between her college admissions coach (yes, that's right, a college admissions coach) and said college admission coach's connections with several publishing houses and publishing agents. naturally, my first thought was a jealously uttered "bitch". my second thought was "oh, jeebus, what's wrong with me? i am 24 years old and have never ever accomplished anything worthwhile in my whole entire life!" ahem. so, yeah, it was a little dramatic and completely illogical, but i may have been on my period, who the hell knows? this morning, i start surfing the net, and i find a story about last week's chick and how she might have plagarized 13 passages in her book from a popular author of young adult drama, and that another 29 passages bear "striking similarities" to scenes in the popular author's novels. naturally, my first thought was a nelson munsen inspired "hah hah!" my second thought was "my stuff may be shit, but at least it's original." my third thought was "i feel kinda bad for this chick. her book was about the pressure on young women of her class to perform like circus dogs, to be successful in walking tightropes and fetching brightly colored balls, and she becomes successful because of this book, and now she's a freaking plagarist." then i reverted to my usual cynical misanthropic self and decided that she deserves what she gets cause if she's smart enough to get into harvard, she's smart enough to realize that she has plagarized one of her favorite authors. its something that all writers have to face, i think. i struggle all the time to balance between being inspired by my idols and just repeating their ideas and style in my own work. (if you laugh because i am referring to myself as a writer, i will kick your ass.) it requires a huge amount of self-criticism and self-reflexivity. everytime you write something, you have to ask yourself, has this been done before? where did i get this idea? am i writing in my own voice, or in the voice of the last author i read? but you HAVE to do it. because while it's true that there is very little in the literary world that is truly original, you can't be a writer by imitating the style or stealing the words of real writers. i guess this harvard chick was more interested in the $500,000 than she was in being a writer. or maybe it was just fan fiction like that star trek novella i wrote in the seventh grade.
