Verbosity Vs. Voice

So my wife thinks I'm verbose.

Which, I am. I really don't deny it, and I couldn't begin to argue against it. Let's face it: those of you who know me are well aware of the fact that I love the sound of my own voice, and that I truly enjoy formulating thoughts and words and meanings in ways that are new and interesting -- well, interesting to me anyway. My ongoing love affair with language and my tireless self-posturing combine to become the soap box upon which I stand to sing, shout, rant and rave. It is what I do.

But it was the fact that my wife's notion that "verbose" is a bad thing that affected, if not offended, me.

To me, my aptitude to wax on about a topic is not a detriment to understanding the subject matter; it is, rather, the melody upon which the lyric is heard. It is my Voice. With a capital V. And a Voice is all that an author has, when it comes right down to it. Without a clear and distinct way in which to tell the story, the audience is not engaged nor entertained.

When I first decided to turn my love for writing into a career, I immediately became dismayed and frustrated by the fact that they're weren't any good ideas left to crack open and explore. It seemed to me that just about everything that needed to be said had already been said, and done so in a much better way than I could ever muster. All the real stories; original ideas of Man vs. God, etc., had been stated and scripted and stylized by masters of verse and prose far more gifted than I. They had crafted ideas into classic plays and poems and motion pictures long before I had ever picked up a number 2 and tried to think of the great American novel. I mean, why remake Casablanca? As Ayn Rand said, there are two kinds of people in the world: Creators and Parasites. Creators come up with new and original ideas, and Parasites spin those creations off into different directions, fashioning only dirivitives of the original, shades of the original color.
This bothered me for years. It stiffled my creativity; affecting my motivation for writing anything of quality and worth; irritated my friends and made me a moody sombitch to be around. I was pissed because what I wanted to do was blocked by the fact that it had already been done. I figured, if I couldn't be the best, why even try?

It took a long time, but I finally snapped out of it. It got to the point where even I couldn't stand my whiny, pussy, sad-sacked angst. I mean, Get over yourself, Miller. So you'll never be Shakespeare. So What? Write because you love to write. Write for you, and to hell with critics or criticism or your own self-imposed crap. I looked around at what was being pumped out and fed to the masses as "journalism" or "literature" or even "news" and realized that Shakespeare was dead. Scott R. Miller, however, still had some time on his hands. And nobody'd heard from him, yet.

Voice is everything. That's what makes a book worth reading. It's what makes a movie worth watching. The actors interpretation of the character (Sean Connery vs. George Lazenby). The director's vision of the final product. And my Voice is this: On my blog, I comment of the obscure and the ordinary, the mundane and the monumental, the pedestrian and the celebrated while stradling a high ivory pedestal with a pompous, of-course-I'm-right, tongue-frimly-in-cheek stance. I rant and I rave and I repeat myself ad nauseum in order to scrutinize and pontificate upon those things that I truly feel are hurting the nation and that others, perhaps, could not care less about. While in my writings and scripts, I take two classics and meld them together. If I can't come up with a classic idea on my own, I'll spin what's there in a new direction. For example: my script "The Money Tree" is basically "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" mixed with "Swingers". Two buddies travel to Vegas in 1968 to avoid the Mob. Much in the same way that the movie "Outland" was "Star Trek" meets "High Noon." (Look it up. I'll wait.) And this Voice not only keeps me writing, it makes me want to write.

During the last 15 years, -- of which, mind you, I've been married for 10, -- I've written nearly 100 magazine articles, scripted four major motion-picture screen-plays, penned a short film that showed at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, ghostwritten two books, created my own How To book, and created this blog. And in that time, my wife has yet to read one single thing I've ever put down on paper.

But then again, I realize that she doesn't ever really have to. She gets it for free full-time directly from the horse's .... mouth. Think I'll go buy her some flowers.