Hypocritical publishing status--

Total submissions to literary magazines: 6
Acceptances: 1
Rejections: 4
Anxiously waiting for a response: 1

Let's see if I can make this as un-pretentious as possible.

It annoys me that some people think writing is about exposure. That it's about having other people say "what great ideas! you're a genius!" These things are great, don't get me wrong. But personally, I'd rather write something that one person can relate to and identify with than something a legion of people can say "great work dood" and nothing else.

But that's not even the only reason why I write. Most of my works are based off of general ideas I've kicked around: thoughts on human nature, frustration at certain people, or a reaction to a book I'm reading. I'm not much of a diarist or a journalist: whenever I try to write intimately about a crisis I'm having I end up wading in self-pity. It's my belief that the best way to control and contain strong emotions is to wrap them up in fiction or poetry. (Or, if you have other kinds of artistic talents, those probably work too.) The thing about "emotion" in fiction and poetry is that I find myself creating the most effective emotive pieces when I add heavy doses of fictional elements into the mix. If I simply try to use artistic language and change names to describe something that's happened to me, the piece is weak.

They say we don't believe in reality. They used to imitate horse's hooves in radio and the movies by banging coconuts together, and it creates a "clop-clop" that you'd never hear from a real horse. But they still use that effect in movies, because the real sound of horse hooves doesn't sound like horse hooves. The more I attempt to imitate real life in my writing, as it's affected me, the more I start to crave my metaphorical horse-hooves. Reality, as I write it, seems so dull and featureless that even my most bare-bones pieces embellish it. And I don't even write science fiction or fantasy - I write about ordinary people most of the time. It's just that if I write about ordinary people I know, I bore myself. I could never really write fanfiction, I think, because I'd bore myself too (also I would detest myself for writing fanfiction.)

I think it's because fiction tends to find order. Even poetry tends to find order in things, while reality is chaos. In literature, artists can choose what details are relevant. In recounting actual events, the relevant details have already been locked in place, and like a reporter you have to find the proper ones for your audience. I write because I have the power to make a world where things make sense and where there's some kind of unity to the world. I can answer the unanswered questions like "Why do you hate me?" or "What if people were actually like that?" or "When you say 'things have changed', what did you mean?" I like that kind of power, and even if no one saw my writing I'd still keep writing because answering those kinds of questions in structured language helps me understand the real world a little bit better.

I hope that made some kind of sense to all of you. I just saw a stray comment in someone's journal that implied they only wrote for exposure, and I wanted to express why writing is so much more than that.

It's also worth noting that writing doesn't always have to be so serious - sometimes I write to amuse, or to answer questions like "What would happen if the only food available was raisins - and there was enough for everyone?" or "Why does my cat keep scratching me when I'm just trying to love him? " Or "How much do I love sandwiches?"