compare thee to a...

Someone asked me who I compare myself to as a writer. I don’t compare myself to anyone. I’m too innocent and gentle for Bukowski and I’m too simple for Miller, I’m too drug-free for Kerouac and too unstructured and angry to be any of the top selling/commercial writers of our time. Unlike those people, I don’t have a rich and/or powerful connection in the publishing industry somewhere to push my name and works forward. I write for myself to keep myself alive (or, at the very least, sane). I write because whilst others love to be mountain climbing or partying or generally having an endless succession of dinners and dates, I love to be indoors with books and pens and computers and anything that involves using the word to express, to inform, to communicate. Going out as a teenager for me usually involved a trip to the stationers followed by a film and time drifting through the book store. I found punk rock but that was a way of challenging conventional thoughts and beliefs for me and not an excuse to dress up, get drunk and destroy things. I’m not a fan of science fiction or crime fiction or fantasy… I like writings in which the struggles of daily life are depicted… struggles such as trying to find meaning in life and a sense of belonging, a sense of self and of self-worth. I love to read of isolation and despair but of creativity arising from such. So, I suppose, that is what my writing tends to emulate. Therefore, could I say I liken myself to Knut Hamsun in his book Hunger? I’m not sure, as much as I loved Hamsun, I found him irritating too. He made the most ridiculous of choices. However, it is said that the people who irritate us the most are the ones who remind us of ourselves. Then, of course, there is Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar was very much a book I considered to be similar in style to what I at least hope to write like but having read her poetry I realise that we are nothing alike. George Orwell? I wish. 1984, the greatest of books… I veer towards the precise subversive thoughts and cynicism but the book is a masterpiece. Thomas Hardy spent more time describing the hills and fields filled with sheep than I would spend writing an entire book. Thus, I seek my own voice and I don’t compare myself to anyone, writer or otherwise.

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