A note within a note to friends of this publication: I treasure you, and I’ve been a little forward with you, oversharing as I’ve sent out a lot of stuff over the weeks while I kickstarted my portfolio on this platform. I commit to tone it down a bit, planning to do a weekly round-up and, I hope, one longer piece here. I’m excited about other plans I have here and the kind subscribers who have liked what they saw and stayed around. Anyway, let’s start again.
TL;DR - Stop being a pompous ass. Imagine anyone reading your stuff is actually a real human who deserves respect.
I’d like to read this aloud to you.
It’s not that I like the sound of my own voice.
Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke, is an autocratic chain gang captain who settles an argument. Scene below.
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Some men, you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week -- which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don't like it anymore than you men.
Online, we shout into the void. The only real conversation I have these days is with friends in the pub: face-to-face, using my words like a big boy. And they don’t suffer fools gladly. I go home humbled, having struggled to gain traction in something which alternates between amusing banter and political finger pointing. But at least I’m not misunderstood and nobody hits anyone.
Online, I’m a mouthpiece with no ears, so I carry on, tone deaf, and walk over your opinions, your preferences. I can’t know if you’re bored, exhilarated, an ally or a hater, until you respond. You’re more likely though to shut down - reject what I wrote, dismiss it and move along. “Dumb prick”, you think, or worse.
What I write is not opinion though- it’s opinionATED, that’s to say I need to adopt a position otherwise that writing won’t reach you. “But I’m misunderstood!”, I cry, or would do if I actually became aware of how you think. We accuse ‘the algorithms’ of engendering contentious conversations, but I think most of it comes from our human attempts to elicit a response. We can be dumb pricks.
So I try to be sensitive to my readers. The problem is I come across as a crass fool, and I communicate through a terrible medium: the written word. Online, my words are dispatched instantly rather than laying fallow to later germinate or die of natural causes. A real human editor can fix this in good old dead trees, but this costs the writer a significant amount of money and pride.
I am an Illusionist
I am an illusionist. I am a little obsessed (ironically) with the book, The Prestige by Christopher Priest, which is a story of obsession, mastery-of-craft and illusion. (I am preparing a full length edition on this). I write under a pen name, not to deceive the reader, but myself. My pen name, and the writing I attribute to it, performs a trick on me - I stop being Clark Kent just by taking off my glasses - and we all share the trick, we both fall for it, in the words of The Prestige’s Alfred Borden:
“Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”
What Kind of Foil am I?
Please excuse the pun. There are broadly three types of characters in storytelling: the Main Character, MC or protagonist; the antagonist or villain of the piece; and the Foil.
In Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri is the foil to Mozart. Salieri’s character is contrasted with Wolfie’s. Salieri is bound by conventions, has practised his art for years, is bitter and miserable: Mozart is a little shit. The historical Salieri is treated so badly by Shaffer’s characterisation though.
In The Prestige, Angier is foil to Borden, and Borden to Angier - both demand our empathy and disgust.
Now I wonder: am I Salieri or am I Mozart? I’m afraid I’m neither - how can you have imposter syndrome if you’re really bad at what you do? I don’t know. Maybe Niall Etheridge can be my Main Character, and this peanut behind the keyboard can be the Foil.
Niall Etheridge is an aspiring writer whose anxiety reaches crisis levels before, during and after writing.
"peanut behind the keyboard" really got me haha. Nice piece! Very relatable