The Truth About My Writing

Early in my writing career I vowed that I would only write the truth, bravely and without fear. I never wrote another word after that.

That's almost true. What would be more true would be to say that I could never sustain any sort of honesty in my writing, that what might start off sincerely would soon veer off into self deception, into hiding from the truth and concealing it from myself. Attempts to reveal myself, my defects and psychological deformities, would invariably shift into self-aggrandizing presentation, and as soon as I noticed, I would stop writing.

I tried many different formats and genres, but could never complete anything before my writing was causing me to taste sour lies. So I stopped writing.

Instead, I thought about writing. I thought about stories I would write. So long as the stories remained in my head, totally imaginary, they could be true. I imagined creating a novel about a writer that didn't write, that was unable to write or to express himself without lying, and so stopped writing. This was so pathetic that I even stopped thinking about writing for a while. Such recursion or self-reference seemed like such a dishonest gimmick. Even my imagination had become a maze of self deception.

I have decided to renounce that vow and write lies. I will not limit myself to lies, but I won't care whether what I write is honest or not. Perhaps I will be able to conceal true facts about my existence in a thicket of lies, or perhaps I will find the freedom to be honest by being a liar. Take everything that follows with a grain of salt.