/lit/ - Literature

When I crack open that old musty book of self-mythology that I keep in my mind, I find a chapter titled something like: “Touched by the Muse: In Which the Author Receives Divine Inspiration While Sitting in His Dorm Room, and Thus Begins a Career in Writing*.” Surely this chapter describes a paradigm shift in the author’s life—a call to adventure on his Hero’s Journey™, if you will. But what is that asterisk next to the title? You glance down to the bottom of the page and find a block of text that reads:

“Please note that the events in this chapter, although not entirely fabricated, are somewhat exaggerated. Similar to how an alcoholic may wake up one morning to find himself on a kitchen table, drenched in his own urine, in his ex-wife’s house, on Christmas morning, thinking, Man, how did I become an alcoholic all of a sudden?, what is shown to us through revelation nothing new, but rather the revealing of something that’s been with us all along, but we’ve neglected to notice. In fact, I’d been writing semi-obsessively for years, but I never thought of it as writing,

“I thought of it, instead, as songwriting. Writing was for people who wrote down words, but I kept track of my songs through voice memos and garageband demos, so even though ‘songwriter’ literally has the word ‘writer’ in it, I never considered myself to be of the same breed as those people who knew how to craft plots and characters and sentences.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself, before I even began writing songs, I wrote poetry. This is when I will have to subdue the embarrassment-glands in my brain that are currently yelling ‘retreat!’ because poetry is maybe the most embarrassing of all art forms, and adolescent poetry is even worse. Nevertheless, I will carry on.

“Long before I knew who Wordsworth was, I wrote from ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ and what produces more powerful feelings in a 13-year-old boy than, you guessed it, girls. I, a lowly freshman, had a doomed crush on a senior girl who looked down on me from a pedestal that I expertly built just for her. Talking to her was (obviously) out of the question, so how else could I deal with the light-headed feeling that fell over me whenever I passed her in the hallway than by composing overly-dramatic poetry in the notes app of my iPhone 4? It was almost an unconscious impulse—I would black out in a hormonal haze, and come to with a heavy-handed sonnet staring back at me. Thus began a storied history of sublimating my sexual and romantic urges into art.

Ok it's done. Let the thread archive from here.