When I trace the many people I’ve stolen from in building whatever I have that might be called my “voice” when I write for myself — by which I mean, when I write here, these days; I don’t get a chance to write outside of the professional entertainment journalist voice anywhere else anymore — I go to a collection of well-worn references: Grant Morrison’s Speakeasy columns and letters pages in The Invisibles*, Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathan Carroll books I read at impressionable ages, Bill Drummond’s 1990s writing in things like 45 and the like. A bunch of things I read at the point when I was finding myself writing more and more by mistake and trying to figure out how to present myself on the page that way.
It’s a reminder, in its own way, that I got into writing by mistake. It was the thing I did to give myself something to illustrate in art school, and even before that, in high school — my final year in high school, I failed to do any proper final project for my art class all year and so handed in this comic strip I’d been writing and drawing for myself in desperation; the feedback was more or less, “We don’t get comics, but the writing isn’t bad,” which was probably a sign I didn’t pay attention to at the time. (All of that work was left behind when I moved to the U.S.; it’s probably a good thing. I think I might even have thrown it out, when I think back.)
Writing was a fallback, a means-to-an-end that I didn’t think twice about, until I did. I can remember interviewing to do the Masters degree program in my final year of art school, and them asking me what I’d do if I got accepted into the program. I didn’t have a real answer, beyond “I don’t feel like I’ve finished whatever it is I’m doing now, and I’m too scared to go out there and fail to get a job,” but I offered up a jumble of sentences and ended with something along the lines of, “and I think I should write more, I think there’s something more I can do with writing,” and that was the part of the interview where they seemed to relax and get animated about the prospect of me continuing my education.
At that point, I was in love with language and the potential it had to thrill and amuse and educate, but I couldn’t have told you that at the time. All I knew was that I’d read something occasionally and think to myself, oh, there’s something there I need to remember for some reason, and fold it up and put it into a filing cabinet in my brain. I knew I was studying and storing, I just didn’t know what for. No wonder, given that experience, I find myself fetishizing following gut instinct today. I knew my future career decades too early, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.