I didn’t expect everything to change this weekend. Least of all did I expect it to happen while I was watching Jay & Silent Bob Reboot but that’s kind of what happened.
I would never have described myself as a Kevin Smith fanboy. I mean I liked his films and, back when I was at college planning to become a film maker, I was inspired by his career which at the time had gone from making Clerks for next to no money to making Dogma which I absolutely loved and was one of the things (along with His Dark Materials) that showed me you could use religion in stories and not worry about who you offended.
I was at college when Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back was released and maybe that had something to do with it because there’s no better way to realise how much time has passed than by seeing a fully grown adult playing one of the main characters who was playing a baby in the first film.
But that’s not the revelation I had. That’s more like a description of the comfortable nostalgia I felt while I was watching the film.
And the film was a catalyst for change rather than a revelation itself, the final straw in something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. It seems a lot more obvious now that I’m writing these words, but I think that for a long time I was blind to it. It might seem like a dumb thing to say, but it was important to me, so I am going to give it its own line. I realised that:
I have been putting much more effort into trying to convince myself that I am a writer, than to actually writing.
It was all the other shit that I was doing that seemed like the kind of thing a writer would do but wasn’t actually “the work”. It was stuff that I know other writers do (and probably get a lot of value out of, but we’re not all the same) and knowing that I did it as well made me feel like I was a writer as well. All the while ignoring the simple fact that the ONLY thing that makes someone a writer is doing the actual writing!
So things have changed in my head now. After watching Jay & Silent Bob Reboot on Saturday night I read all of Kevin Smith’s Tough Shit on Sunday and, apart from some now very awkward references to Harvey Weinstein, that book really solidified things for me. The way I think about all of this has changed and inevitably that means that the stuff I do is going to change. More writing, less of the stuff that only made me feel like a writer.