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This Is Not a Hobby

Ben O’Mara August 09

Encouraged, avoided, assured and ignored – such is the life of the emerging writer. In the June edition of Meanjin, Ben O’Mara contemplates the anxieties of going semi-pro; from grappling with the day job and freelance work to reaching the heights of artistic wankery and, finally, finding joy in uncertainty. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page. Ben will also be appearing at Magazine at the MWF on Sat Sept 4 – more details here.



For me, writing has never been easy. Like most writers I know, my life as a storyteller is characterised by rejection. It is a path riddled with uncertainty.

When I was eighteen I studied creative writing at university. My marks were average. In fact, most of my life back then was average. Three days a week I packed shelves in the suburban cocoon of a Franklins supermarket. At night and on weekends I played bass guitar badly in a half-arsed pop rock band. We had a few monster amps, some Fender Stratocaster guitars and a motley crew of distortion pedals, but little real talent. When I wasn’t being booed off stage I spent my time recovering from hangovers and knocking out whiny and contrived prose with a multitude of grammatical sins. My lecturers marked my writing assignments accordingly.

I sucked at being a rock star, but I read widely: Kafka, Joyce, Dickens, Mishima and others from the canon. The reading lists at university were an eye opener for a bloke like me. My single-sex Catholic school education wasn’t particularly open-minded; it just bred an unhealthy obsession with guilt and apologies. I turned up to my first writing lecture a teenage worry wart. Writers such as Peter Carey, John Birmingham, Irvine Welsh, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe blew my mind. Their stories introduced me to the fantastic, the absurd and the prickly satire of bent and anarchic humour. I was hooked. Growing up religious had left me with way too much faith in authority and the powers that be. I needed a reality check. The punch and verve of those writers, the warts-and-all, take-no-prisoners approach to their work was intoxicating. It helped me to sharpen the critical edge in my own writing, take heart in the personal and subjective, and to craft my own work with a sense of swagger and style. And to articulate my distrust of institutions.

The problem is that inspiration will only take you so far as a writer. As a student, I struggled with sentimentality. My stories were flaky and went nowhere. They seemed written on the surface rather than from a place deep down where I understood the motivations of my characters and their actions. The images I used were pretty but hung disconnected from the dramatic core of my stories. I found the words ‘limp’ and ‘passive’ appearing regularly in my assessment reports. I needed to change the way I went about it. To improve my writing and take it to the next level, I embarked on an experiment in the hyperbole of extremity on the suburban road, and in the words of And Justice For All–era Metallica, at the frayed ends of sanity: post-party car-surfing in the leafy backstreets of middle-class Eltham. Like most of my writing projects, it seemed to make sense at the time.


 

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