I Am Not My Inspiration

It seems like the majority of artists that I have heard or talked tend to write from their own personal point of view. Many can connect each piece they've created to a particular experience or set of experiences in their life. I guess it makes sense that this would be the natural mode of operation for most people, but it never has been for me. Even when I was in ninth grade, just beginning to write poetry and stories, what excited me about writing was the opportunity it gave me to put myself in someone else's shoes. Back then, my writing obsession was violent criminals. It seemed to me that people constantly wrote them off as simply "crazy" and left it at that. "Crazy" doesn't explain the thought processes people have, it almost implies that there is none. I figured even if the logic is wrong, there must be some sort of logic, so I set out to try to figure it out in several stories that were written from the points of views of murderers. I remember a classmate of mine who admired my writing and began writing his own violent stories. I never liked his stories because he wrote about violence for the sake of violence, and that was obvious from reading them. Typical teenage male attraction to delinquency was not what was behind my writing.

Fast forward a bunch of years, and I realize I'm doing the same thing. I still generally don't write from my own point of view. I constantly and naturally create characters and then try to figure out what they think and feel. Even when a song is inspired by my own emotion or experience, I create an extreme caricature out of it. For example, in the song Get my Gun on Reverse Psychology (Click to check out the lyrics), my character is observing the problematic aspects of our modern society and battling with the contradictory desires it arouses - one to help make things better, and another to protect himself from the messed up world. Sometimes trying to help others can affect you negatively, whether it's by putting you in physical danger, inconveniencing you, or overtaxing your resources. This is definitely something I have battled with, but for the song, I took it to the extreme. My character is so conflicted that he is willing to wield a weapon to help uplift the world, not recognizing that in doing so, he is becoming a threat to that which he wants to save.

My interest in imagining different perspectives has not decreased since ninth grade, and now I also feel like extreme caricatures are so much more effective for exploring emotions and ideas than more realistic characters. I could have talked about my own inability to balance philanthropy with supporting myself, but I think the picture that Get my Gun paints is far more compelling and universal. The thing is that my life is complex and arbitrary in many ways. If I'm trying to make a point or discuss a particular idea, it seems to me that my relatively unfocused life has a lot of extra stuff that does not belong in the conversation. Taking things to the extreme is kind of like stripping away the fat. If I want to write a song about being disappointed, I might start with my own experiences of the feeling, but then remove any opposing feelings. I have been disappointed before, but I have also had my hopes fulfilled before - but in the song, there is just disappointment.

That's all I have to say about that.