Some people get the wrong idea when they’re inspired by great people in their line of work. They think that because this person made it by doing what they do a certain way that they should try and do it that same way themselves and try to imitate those great people, as opposed to merely learning from them. Being original is a key to success in almost any field (except perhaps politics, these days) and certainly in anything artistic. You’ll be called out as a shallow imitator if you simply try to be like someone else.

The reason that those people are considered “great” is because they do what they do like nobody else can. They have a certain feel for what they do. They know better than anyone that their path is never easy, for anything easy is rarely worth doing. Yet they know better than to gripe and moan. Instead, they face these challenges head on, knowing that the end result of their efforts will be worth all the painful misadventures along the way. Even if it is only the artist who comes to appreciate it, the enlightening sense of fulfillment attained after sticking to a rough project, trial after trial, prevails, and illuminates, with the artist reaching an almost an orgiastic state of serene satisfaction.

The path to a completed work is a river that is damning, dark, and demented, with an infinite number of surprise twists and hairpin turns. It’s even been known to completely reverse direction and start flowing backwards from time to time, requiring “an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene,” as Dr. Thompson so eloquently wrote in “the Vegas book.” However, even if you crash horribly up against the shore and your dinghy is badly damaged, the most important thing is to grab some duct tape and soldier on.

Even if your end result proves fruitless, and you are disappointed by the end result, there is always something to be learned there. What worked, what didn’t? What can I, as a writer/painter/filmmaker/etc. learn from this? Learning from your mistakes is something we’ve all been told to do hundreds upon thousands of times by our teachers, parents, colleagues, you name it, and I’m sure you don’t need me, some smug bastard typing away at his computer, to tell you that once again. My point is that no effort is wasted as long as it is your effort. Those cheap imitators I was talking about earlier… Their effort is always wasted. Without a driving creative force of their own, they fail to tap into the potential hidden somewhere deep within.

Anyway. The whole point that I was trying to get to was that this is noticeably difficult for us writers, and finding your own voice, as anyone will tell you, is the most difficult part about writing. It can take a lifetime. As a huge fan of Thompson, and after having read many of his works, I almost feel compelled to try write like him. I have to restrain myself, and say, “No. This is wrong. This will fail if I try to be Thompson. No one has, or ever will be able to, write like him.” This is especially crucial, as he had one of the most distinct and creative writing styles of almost any writer, and was certainly the most inventive of any author I’ve ever read. I need to remember to simply learn from Hunter, and keep the overall voice wholly my own, as much as possible. As with anything else, imitators will fail miserably and fall flat on their face, then be humiliated and exposed for their lucid literary mimicry. A bad piece that is wholly your own is much better than a piece where you try to be somebody else.

But I digress. Such a task is daunting for us writers, as the words of those we admire are constantly whirring around our brains, bouncing back and forth against the interior of our cranial cavities. Inside there somewhere dwells the prosy (or poetic) mind: the curious mind, the analytical mind, the explorative mind, the mind with something to say.

I was in a relationship with a girl who never understood how I wrote some of the things that I did. My method has always been to just start writing and let the words manifest themselves on the nerve impulse traveling from my brain to my fingers. Somewhere along that neurological tramway is where the magic happens. The rest, I can’t really explain; it just sort of happens. Whenever I start to think too much about what exactly it is that I’m writing, it becomes considerably more difficult, and an interior mental pressure is built up. The words have to flow, and if I try to carefully calculate a commendable concoction of confabulation, it just doesn’t work. Afterwards, of course, it is crucial to go back and make sure that everything that I’ve written actually makes some sort of coherent sense. Otherwise, it would just come out as indecipherable gibberish, and nobody wants to read that; most certainly none of you fine people.

Well, that’s the gist of it, anyway. Be true to yourself, don’t judge others unfairly, blah blah blah. You know how the ending to this spiel goes. I’m not really writing this as advice. I just felt like writing about writing a little bit. Also coffee. Coffee never fails to get me in a writing mood, and with the caffeine buzz, I can type faster. Haha. Go have fun, kids, and DON’T let the man get you down.