9 September 2012

The delusional writer

Eddie Wright posted this wonderful comment on a thread at Backword:

Since when is being delusional a bad thing?

I think the very act of sitting down to write is delusional. Creating something from nothing and assuming anyone, anywhere will read it and respond to it, is delusional. If writers weren’t delusional, nothing would ever get written. We’d all sit around all day working mindless bullshit jobs, coming home, eating dinner and watching reality TV while being perfectly practical and realistic and never finding that inspiration and perseverance and CONFIDENCE to sit down and just fucking do it.

But we’re not practical, we’re not realistic, we’re not traditional…we’re all a bunch of weirdo, delusional freaks who thought someone would actually WANT to read our highly personal, sometimes traumatizing, sometimes bizarre, sometimes ridiculous, nonsense. You bet your ass I’m delusional. I’m delusional as shit and I’m proud of it. The moment I get realistic, the moment I get logical, the moment I get rational is the moment I’m checking out.

Lobotomize me if you have to but I will not give up my delusions.

I got there from here, which I reached from Mike Cane’s latest and possibly greatest deconstruction of the Grand Panjandrum.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I carry this in my LifeDrive:

Nicole Griffith --

I read somewhere that someone once said that in order to make one's living in any field of creative endeavor one had to be almost psychotic. You have to believe in yourself so strongly, to sit there day after day with your computer or your pen or your piece of paper or guitar, and think "I can do this. 999 billion people before me have failed, but *I* can do this." It's quite a psychotic state of mind to have to hang onto year after year. It takes years. Nobody does it overnight.

-- interview printed in the eBook, "The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0" - Dave Slusher