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"Why Should I Care?"
13 years ago
General
I have laid a lot of scorn, anger, and accusations at my ex-wife's feet the past few years, but I'd like to think I'm also a person who will not shirk my own mistakes...Hell, it's been accurately accused that I practically BATHE in them daily...and that I will always admit when I have unfairly wronged someone. After listening to and mentally chewing over Neil Gaiman's recent commencement speech (reblogged EVERYWHERE, but here's a convenient link if you, like me, are one of the handful who hadn't heard it yet: http://vimeo.com/42372767 ), I think something she once said that effectively killed my drive to write anything for YEARS and is a HUGE contributing factor to my ongoing creative issues...was taken totally out of context by me.
Back when we were still in the early days of our relationship, back when she still could stand to be in the same room as me, I was working on a super-hero comic called "The Storm Riders"; at the time, I felt comics had gotten too bogged down in navelgazing and deconstruction and military-style antiheroics and, after watching stuff like "Independence Day" and other big-budget blockbuster movies, felt the same aesthetic could be applied to comics as well. Huge stories, huge scenes, huge stakes, huge drama...the story I was working on involved a rogue angel attempting to trigger Armageddon and a group of young heroes trying to stop her, culminating in them actually fighting the animated Statue of Liberty in the heart of a celestial hurricane around the blasted ruins of Manhattan and having to sacrifice one of the young heroes to stop her. My plan was to one-up the freakin' "Dark Phoenix Saga" in sheer spectacle...
...and her response was "Alright...why should I care?"
I was destroyed. This was supposed to be a HUGE story, something to "shake the pillars of Heaven," a story intended to "make the gods notice us again" in scale, and she totally dismantled everything with four words:
Why.
Should.
I.
Care.
I never recovered...every story I wrote since then were SHORT, carefully measured exercises in pandering to an already-waiting audience (ie. gratuitous fanfic porn, even if it was of my own characters). The one time I let myself go balls-out, "Omega," was when I was so consumed with my own chemically-enhanced grief that I didn't give a fuck what I wrote. I'd start projects, create characters, get responses...and drop them and move to the next thing. Everything I actually put EFFORT into was fan-work, right down to the K-Girls, just so I'd have an already waiting audience, and once Shin started cutting off the support to them, I lost interest since there was now actual RISK involved. Hell, it's why I refocused on drawing instead of writing, because then I could get the quick fix, give the audience what they wanted, and run before I could be hurt, distracting them with the next picture.
I chickened out. Of EVERYTHING. The increasing instability of everything else in my life just made things worse, to the point where every time I try and do something creative, I hear those same four words screaming in my ear.
Why.
Should.
I.
Care.
...thing is, I never actually paid attention to what else she said. I was too distracted by hearing my grand dreams, my pretensions, being deflated like a noisy balloon. She wasn't saying it to hurt me...she was saying it to try and get me to start putting the story into perspective. I was so wrapped up in the HUGE that the characters were cyphers, hollow comic book archetypes instead of, y'know, actual CHARACTERS. She wasn't insulting me, she was trying to get me to realize what the readers themselves would say, and she'd try and bring it up again whenever I'd try another project.
See, that's the whole POINT of being a writer. That's our entire fucking JOB. We are supposed to hear someone say "Why should I care?" and answer "THIS is why you should care!" We craft these characters, we plot out their lives, we tell these stories to GET the audience to care, and, if we can't, then WE SHOULDN'T BE FUCKING WRITING.
By reacting the way I did, all I did was prove that I wasn't capable of actually being what I'd wanted to be since fucking kindergarten, that I had talent and ambition, but no discipline, no drive to actually succeed.
I get it now. It took me, what, fifteen fucking years, but I finally GET it.
And, to the woman I wrongly accused all these years of destroying me...I'm sorry.
...why is it that, the more time passes, the more I realize that I didn't actually start becoming someone worth being around until after I lost everything that ever mattered to me?
Back when we were still in the early days of our relationship, back when she still could stand to be in the same room as me, I was working on a super-hero comic called "The Storm Riders"; at the time, I felt comics had gotten too bogged down in navelgazing and deconstruction and military-style antiheroics and, after watching stuff like "Independence Day" and other big-budget blockbuster movies, felt the same aesthetic could be applied to comics as well. Huge stories, huge scenes, huge stakes, huge drama...the story I was working on involved a rogue angel attempting to trigger Armageddon and a group of young heroes trying to stop her, culminating in them actually fighting the animated Statue of Liberty in the heart of a celestial hurricane around the blasted ruins of Manhattan and having to sacrifice one of the young heroes to stop her. My plan was to one-up the freakin' "Dark Phoenix Saga" in sheer spectacle...
...and her response was "Alright...why should I care?"
I was destroyed. This was supposed to be a HUGE story, something to "shake the pillars of Heaven," a story intended to "make the gods notice us again" in scale, and she totally dismantled everything with four words:
Why.
Should.
I.
Care.
I never recovered...every story I wrote since then were SHORT, carefully measured exercises in pandering to an already-waiting audience (ie. gratuitous fanfic porn, even if it was of my own characters). The one time I let myself go balls-out, "Omega," was when I was so consumed with my own chemically-enhanced grief that I didn't give a fuck what I wrote. I'd start projects, create characters, get responses...and drop them and move to the next thing. Everything I actually put EFFORT into was fan-work, right down to the K-Girls, just so I'd have an already waiting audience, and once Shin started cutting off the support to them, I lost interest since there was now actual RISK involved. Hell, it's why I refocused on drawing instead of writing, because then I could get the quick fix, give the audience what they wanted, and run before I could be hurt, distracting them with the next picture.
I chickened out. Of EVERYTHING. The increasing instability of everything else in my life just made things worse, to the point where every time I try and do something creative, I hear those same four words screaming in my ear.
Why.
Should.
I.
Care.
...thing is, I never actually paid attention to what else she said. I was too distracted by hearing my grand dreams, my pretensions, being deflated like a noisy balloon. She wasn't saying it to hurt me...she was saying it to try and get me to start putting the story into perspective. I was so wrapped up in the HUGE that the characters were cyphers, hollow comic book archetypes instead of, y'know, actual CHARACTERS. She wasn't insulting me, she was trying to get me to realize what the readers themselves would say, and she'd try and bring it up again whenever I'd try another project.
See, that's the whole POINT of being a writer. That's our entire fucking JOB. We are supposed to hear someone say "Why should I care?" and answer "THIS is why you should care!" We craft these characters, we plot out their lives, we tell these stories to GET the audience to care, and, if we can't, then WE SHOULDN'T BE FUCKING WRITING.
By reacting the way I did, all I did was prove that I wasn't capable of actually being what I'd wanted to be since fucking kindergarten, that I had talent and ambition, but no discipline, no drive to actually succeed.
I get it now. It took me, what, fifteen fucking years, but I finally GET it.
And, to the woman I wrongly accused all these years of destroying me...I'm sorry.
...why is it that, the more time passes, the more I realize that I didn't actually start becoming someone worth being around until after I lost everything that ever mattered to me?
(no, no further input. would it matter?)
Its damn tough (oh how I know about fighting my own demons), but the freedom when you figure out one of the big things is overwhelming.
I totally look forward to seeing what this causes creatively!
I can only say I hope for the best for you and for whatever may be born from this epiphany.
Or.....something like that.