The Drudgery of Writing (at least for me)

Matt Drudge is a mystery.

I don’t even remember what it was, but something prompted me to look up Matt Drudge on Wikipedia. (Yea, I still feel some pangs of guilt for not donating to Wikipedia because I use it all the time, and like my occasional/regular listening to NPR, from which I derive what I think is real benefit no matter how Left I or anyone else thinks they are) I have never donated money to either one in “thanks” for contributing to my life.

Seems there’s always something I am feeling guilty about. On the other hand, I get a little rebellious feeling going in response to myself, and conclude, “It’s their own damn fault for making it so easy for me to access their information. I’m not obligated to pay for it. We didn’t make an agreement; they simply put it out there. It’s not my problem they don’t charge. Welcome to the free damn market or if you don’t like it, man-up and enter the competition like anybody else with a Set.

Seems to me he makes his money – and perhaps his reputation – on everybody else’s work.

Drudge is a mystery to me because I swear, I go all through his website and I can’t find one thing the guy actually came up with on his own. I suppose the link titles – leading to articles somebody else wrote – are original; I read that somewhere, spun to Drudge’s own slant, but again, click on any one of them and you go to another guy’s article. My jury is still out on that part: the fact that he in some form rewrites a headline only to take the easy way out and simply deliver you to somebody else’s work. Is that even ethical?!

Where’s his real effort, anyway?

I guess it’s in the amalgamation of it all. His bread and butter is in the one-stop-shopping phenomenon. My trouble is, I don’t respect it too much. But that just boils down to Picasso’s bull. I look at what he does – apparently to go all over the place, find news he wants to regurgitate, and links to it, all on one crappy-looking bare bones page, which I guess translates to very economically efficient and in the other important ways, very effective – and I think, “I could do that“; it all seems so simple.

Genius, I guess.

After reading a couple of reviews of his book, Drudge Manifesto, I think I am not completely stupid, at least not in my analysis and opinion. Many others who know more than I do don’t think so much of his actual writing either. It’s full of blank pages, and full of pages with virtually nothing on them. Out of 247 pages, it’s figured that about 119 are no-kidding original Matt Drudge-written stuff. But that also includes 9-some pages of his poetry. OMG.

Oh, I guess I’d better not criticize that; I have written poetry and maybe I would like to publish it someday. Some I think is good, some I wish I could find a way to transform it into good, and some, maybe a lot, is crap.

I shouldn’t get off on the tangent of my own writing. I’ll start thinking about Hemmingway and Fitzgerald and Vonnegut and get confused, inspired and depressed. That kind of viciousness has gotten me so discouraged I quit working on my first novel, thinking myself too inclined to want to be a romantic and dramatic. Also my first children’s book, which I have actually treated as finished and have submitted to quite a number of agents and publishers with some responses of silence and lots of rejection. I guess I need to give in and start going to writer’s workshops and critical review reading groups and writer’s conferences, but I haven’t because I guess I am still deeply stuck in the arrogance phase.

Well, ******* if they don’t like my children’s book just like it is.

That’s a problem, I admit. My attitude, I mean, and my language. And my perspective on the quality of the book.

And my first young boy’s fantasy-adventure book, which of course I think will be a huge winner because it’s so unique in and of itself but classic in its structural references back to previous best-sellers. That’s a problem too, I’m pretty sure.

I’ve stopped on all of them because I think I am too caught up in the whole “being a writer” thing, trying to be or wanting to be, and getting too… something; I don’t know what. I’m not saying I’m teetering on heading to a lonely cabin up in the hills to knock back a fifth of something and satisfy the demons of confusion and depression with a shotgun, or just sit in a dump of a hotel room in Montreal and turn on the gas while sipping cheap vodka. I’m just saying it can be discouraging sometimes. Alot.

I really am a stable, happy guy. I am happy with where I am and what I am doing, and what my plans for the future are, and my family. I am grounded by them and have lots going on in my life besides writing.

I get tired of… no… yes… no…yes… I am tired of being philosophical, talking philosophical talk, being a dreamer and a romantic. So I just stop writing. I go back to thinking I need to be a regular grounded guy. No dreaming, no philosophizing and no romanticizing. So my mood to write is dead. That also is a problem. At least if I want to get anywhere as a writer.

I think it’s right about here where my wife has had it with me and my attitude.

Anyone who knows says you’ve got to write every day if you want to develop as a writer. Even if you just want to improve, or just want to improve a particular piece in progress, you’ve got to write every day. Well, I guess that‘s not me.

At least no right now and not recently.

I think I’m sick of writing. I haven’t written anything for my website since November. What I have reluctantly published since then (February I think; I’m even too lazy to check the date) was written in November or maybe before. Then I got a wild hair one day tinged with a little bit of guilt, and I finally published three articles that had mold on them. I have been so discouraged from the desire to write I didn’t edit them but half-heartedly, or at least like I should have. I am no editor. I need an editor. Every time I publish something I prove to myself I desperately need a real editor.

But these guys, Hemmingway and Fitzgerald and Vonnegut, had something. And Drudge has found something.

I listen to a lot of recorded books because I have a long commute. Out of all the books I have listened to I have probably not listened to a Hemingway book in a year, so out of a sense of longing and maybe some kind of sense of obligation or feeling some twisted sense of guilt, or both, I thought I had better get one – finally – and re-up my subscription to the Hemingway train of thought. So off to the Library I went and checked out his memoir, A Moveable Feast.

Classic Hemingway in the form of very personal information – an inside view of personal relationships and events, even difficulties. I felt as though I had a private discussion with him about his earliest days as a writer and as a friend to Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce among others. Hemingway talked candidly about how good he thought The Sun Also Rises was, his first novel. It was published when he was about 27.

27!? Are you kidding me?!

When I was 27 I couldn’t figure out how save even a little bit of money, let alone write a classic novel. Oh, but Hemingway couldn’t either (he lamented their financial woes in Feast repeatedly), but he did start making real money eventually. Oh yea, and he – like the majority of real writers – supported himself in the meantime by writing for newspapers and magazines, and it was pretty mundane stuff oft times, too. Well, I don’t feel like attempting that, either. So, no, I suppose I am not a real writer, and perhaps I’ll not get anywhere.

Sure, he wrote Feast in retrospect (it was finished when he was 60 and published two years after his death), so that was safe to say: that he thought it was good, but he expressed himself as if he were in that time, as a 24-year-old writer in Paris. And he and Scott Fitzgerald were struggling to write, to earn money, to get along, and not everything was assured; not by a long shot. But as it turns out, it was. Everything that is, except long, happy, stable lives. Seems like they consumed themselves, or were consumed. Sacrificed themselves to the success of their work. Quite a commitment on their parts. And on the parts of their families, as it turned out.

But Drudge: I haven’t found a thing he’s actually done himself; at least not in comparison to all the stuff of other people he so prolifically redirects us to. Crap. But that’s his art, and it’s not crap. Others say he writes the rare or occasional piece himself. Ok, fine, but if he’s all that, why doesn’t he do it every day? And if he does, why can’t I find it? I accept he (sort of) shows he’s all that on his radio show and in television interviews, so all the more – why not write his own stuff on his website? I think all this linking crap is cheap. The most remarkable thing is, his proponents routinely go to him as a genuine reliable source for breaking and unique information – that’s the very core of what has made him all he is [purported to be]. Time magazine even named him one of the 100 most influential people of 2006.

Whatever.

Oh yea, turns out it was Townhall magazine I was reading. Matt Drudge was on the cover of the November 2010 issue. Seems they are also fascinated by him. And if they don’t take him seriously (and perhaps they do), then they do take seriously the phenomenon of him. And ultimately, he is making money. If his advertisers say he’s real, then he’s real. So now I’ve been sucked in and I’m fascinated by him.

This is a form of writer’s cramp, I’m sure.

So I’m back to Picasso’s bull. If it’s so simple, so easy, then why haven’t I done it yet? There’s obviously more to it. I have now, in effect, introduced a new definition to the adjective “drudgery”. To do whatever it is that he has actually done.

And while I have an intense if not odd desire to live on Cape Cod someday in the likeness and peace of Kurt Vonnegut, and I am a fan of my fellow Hoosier, and mostly am fascinated by the reception and success of his writing, I am baffled by all the cliché. I read A Man without a Country. I was not favorably impressed. In fact, I thought it was bad enough to think “that’s the quality of a $100 self-published, self-indulgent, at-least-I-got-it-done book”. And Breakfast of Champions. Give me a break. A guy like Vonnegut doesn’t even come up with his own title, and the publisher takes it? Don’t even get me started.