By Brendan O’Meara
Lately I’ve been a bit down on my work as a whole.
Then something sorta clicked.
I remember when I first wanted to be a writer, I wanted to fuse my love of Hemingway and Vonnegut into something all together my own. The leanness of Hemingway with the wit of Vonnegut.
Then I started to make my voice sound too much like other things, too much like what I thought other people might want me to sound like.
I came to try and write “pretty,” and I hate “pretty,” lyrical writing. It’s not me and, frankly, I don’t like to read it very much. I hate when people try to sound overly literary, and that’s what I was finding with my own work.
So I’ve been writing ugly. I remembered why I started.
