You should only write for strangers. You, whoever you are, obscure reader from the heterogenous junkpile of cyberspace, are closer, more intimate to me than anyone of my diminishing entourage. Because I write about whores and transvestites, seedy lawyers and acidheads and...teachers and priests and whoever else crosses my path, mental or physical, questions of reality arise.
Writing is a treacherous, razor-sharp path to follow, but from a technical standpoint, it is no more and no less true than painting. When a painter uses his skills to portray a woman as fleshy, corpulent, thick lipped, sensual, flashing a piece of toosh while smoking a cigar, the viewer and a fortiori the critic sees the genius. If the writer performs the same task, he risks his neck, or the omerta of silence. That being said, the only thing to do is to write and write, in silence, in solitude, and let it forge a stronger temperament.
Cézanne is a reference as painter, and as a solo man, who understands the nature of the challenge before the artist.
Three citations of Cézanne guide my entire technical approach to writing:
"La lumière et l'ombre sont un rapport de couleurs, les deux accidents principaux différant non par leur intensité générale mais par leur sonorité propre. L'ombre est une couleur comme la lumière, mais elle est moins brillante ; lumière et ombre ne sont qu'un rapport de deux tons".
"Peindre d'après nature, ce n'est pas copier l'objectif, c'est réaliser ses sensations".
"Il faut traiter la nature par le cylindre, la sphère et le cône".
These three credos are the cornerstones of my own writing. Writing is the reaction of the personality to outside phenomena, and the placing of it in a cylinder, sphere or cone. Writing is geometrical, as the ideas are contained in invisible abstract containers conceived originally by Euclid, and it is laid down on paper in geometrical fonts, each of which contain a history and talismanic properties proper to each letter, word, phrase, and omission.
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