Posts tagged matt fraction

I don’t think a writer’s commitment is to produce great work. I think aspiring for greatness is a horrendous misstep in any creative endeavor. Because it considers, at the very moment of inception, the audience, the critics, and the world at large. You don’t get to decide that it’s time to record your WHAT’S GOIN’ ON. You just record, and maybe you make WHAT’S GOIN’ ON. You don’t get to decide that now it’s time to write the Great American Novel. A writer/artist/creator is the most unqualified and undeserving to qualify something as “great.” I actually loathe work that aspires for greatness. Like a needy, neurotic, and insecure freak at a dinner party, that work never fails to come off as cloying and desperate, a little Jon-Benet tapdancing in the corner for applause and attention and love.

Eventually it was that line from ED WOOD— I’ll just have to do better next time!— that allowed me to actually start putting stuff out there. like, giving myself the gift of sucking, and the gift of trying to get better. does that make sense? just own it, go out, suck, cut your teeth, try to get better.

I think, then, sometimes, that I feel like I live my entire life under the spell of the Startle Reflex, that I am convinced I’m falling, always falling, that I am anything but fixed, permanent, or secure. Grabbing these things out of the air as I feel the fall come is me trying somehow to prove that no, I am not falling backwards, I am here, safe and stationary. I think I grab for these things to prove it, to say, I am here, and this was here with me. I am obsessed with stealing proof of my existence out of the ether.
-Matt Fraction