Monday, March 25, 2013

may you live in interesting times

Back in college, when I was taking creative write classes to alleviate the rigors of engineering, I entertained classmates with slightly altered accounts of my own life, or tales thereof. I've always kept a journal, a diary or something to that effect, even after my car accident, even if it was just a few scrawled words here and there. Looking back through chunky books of mess from those weeks and months there was a lot of lost time but also a lot of pain I'd rather not revisit, so I turned to the internet to see what I missed.

Words fail me.

There is a curse, "May you live in interesting times." Even if I don't live in interesting times, the way the world has shrunk so the internet touches every spot on the world in an instant...well, we're ensured we don't miss much of anything anytime soon. Which begs the question of how to create anything new or interesting to what must be jaded readers. Face it, if you can pop on the world of twitter, blogger, facebook and the like and inside a few keystrokes and be inundated with real stories of heroism or romance, debauchery or wickedness, how is a mere storyteller ever supposed to attempt to compete? Bad enough knowing the classics are out there, you know, myths and fables and tales handed down over generations - but to have every last impression and event shared over a day? Talk about overload.

So, what do you think. Do books and television shows and movies still provide a bit of alternative escapism, or has it come to the point where we as a society now expect so much more from authors that we hold them to an even higher degree? Or is it just me that seems to see authors in that light?

No comments: