The Balance...

As I said the other day, one of the problems I have with blogging is the associative self-importance that essentially comes hand-in-hand with sharing your thoughts with the world. Who the fuck am I to take up your precious 3 minutes? If you don’t know me, why do you care? If you do know me, you’re probably sick of listening to me anyway. And is anything I say really going to make a difference? Will your life change after you read these words? Will you be entertained? Pissed? Will you be (gasp) bored? Or even worse, more bored than you were when you first stumbled across these ramblings?
That’s my problem, and I’m trying to ignore it. As a writer you kind of have to. Otherwise, what’s the point? I have to BELIEVE I’m not wasting my time or yours when I sit down to put words on page. I have to BELIEVE in my words, that I have something to say...
Hollywood is filled with people who not only believe this, but get off on it. It’s hard to not view yourself as pompous when so many of your piers put across that very same self-image. I attend a weekly hybrid writers/actors workshop in which 10 or more people read, discuss, read, discuss some more and ultimately battle for the ultimate prize of intellectual acknowledgement. It doesn’t really matter what they’re saying – most of the time it amounts to “Listen to me! I know what I’m talking about! I’m THE SHIT!” (speaking of which, how did being compared to bowel movements and excrement ever become a good thing?)
Of course, not everybody who attends this workshop is looking for that recognition. Some of them come for networking purposes, or to see the friends their 60 hour work week keeps them from seeing. Some come to actually improve their craft, to put their baby out there for all to criticize and hope it doesn’t stumble, fall and puke all over itself like a sorority chick on a Saturday night.
At my best, I believe these to be the reasons I keep dedicating a good chunk of my Saturday afternoons to sitting in a classroom. But I know I slip into self-importance too. When I received luke-wam reactions (at best) and “I don’t get it” questions in response to a particularly complicated, intricate AND FLAWED screenplay everybody was kind enough to dedicate their time to reading, my immediate response was “no, you don’t get it you fucking idiot! Did you even READ the script? Pay ATTENTION!” Of course, I didn’t say this out loud, but that didn’t matter – my body language and tone as I kindly repelled their criticism said it for me. My words were great. They were the ones who were wrong.
Of course some months later, that same screenplay isn’t ready for the world, at least partly for the same reasons they pointed out. I both recognize these problems and continue to write off the people who “didn’t get it.” I’m both wrong and right, humbled by them and better than them, because if I’m too much of either one it’s a problem.
I’m generally consumed with antagonizing self-doubt, so much so that my fiancé and her parents once wrote down on a dinner napkin a promise to myself that I would one day recognize myself as talented (with a loophole that I would only do so after I’d completed a script I was proud of). They did this as proof, and they did it to make a point – believe in yourself, or you’ll never achieve anything.
But believe in yourself too much, and you’ll piss off everybody else in the process. I can be an asshole. I know this. I repeatedly kick the shit out of myself because of it. But I never want to be THAT asshole, the one who treats the world as a show written/directed/produced/acted/blessed by himself.
So fuck you, pompous dude. Get off your high horse. To everybody else it looks like you’re riding a donkey.