Narcissism

"So whats your play about?"

"You know Jesus Christ Superstar?"

"Yeah"

"Its like that except about me."

This exchange takes place in a movie called Multiple Sarcasms, which is about a man writing a play. The play is basically autobiographical and is self reflexively also about him writing the play. I happen to thoroughly enjoy this sort of authorial narcissism that places oneself into the story. Other examples are Adaptation, and the web series Clark and Michael.

It seems to me that there is a rather large amount of film, television, plays, books etc. in which the central characters are writers. This of course is not really that surprising after all, writers write about what they know and eventually if they are successful writers, what they know most about is writing and so they begin writing about writers and writing, the way Nickleback sings about being famous rock stars and Brittany Spears sings about the paparazzi. And perhaps there is not really anymore content about writers than doctors, police, computer programmers and housewives, it is merely my own narcissism, which means that I am more interested in and take more notice of characters with which I identify with or inspire me.

A question I am always uncertain of is to what degree to embrace my narcissism in my writing... is it something I should be hiding and disguising? or flaunted and put on display? Creative guru and artistic coach Julia Cameron, in her book on writing, Vein of Gold, suggests that autobiographical writing is important in the process of creativity whether or not you are publishing a memoir. Writing a fairly in depth autobiography is important as a resource for other creative projects. It is a map of your life and experiences which are the very resources one has to draw upon for creativity. It is a form of library index of material to draw upon for writing. I think this is an interesting idea.

Problematically for myself, writing is a form of performance art, that usually requires audience for motivation and completion. I struggle to read my first drafts of anything, preferring to immediately upon completion, read it out loud to my friends, give it to Amy or someone else to edit or in the case of this blog press publish. Once I have pressed publish, I usually go back and am able to make corrections.

I struggle with premature publishing. I apologize. I am working on becoming a more patient writer.

I read this twice before publishing. But I wrote that I read it before I actually had and I actually only read it once.