Punk Fiction

Yep, I’ve rebranded my blog. Gone is the generic Handle on Fiction. Going forward, I’m calling it riff. Why, you ask? That’s actually a bit deeper than just the cutesy acronym it’s got going for it.

riff (according to Merriam-Webster)

music : a short and usually repeated pattern of notes in a song

: a short set of comments on a particular subject

I caught the last three episodes of Dave Grohl’s HBO series, Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways last week and I was reminded again of what I see as the parallels between writing fiction and playing rock and roll. Anyone that reads this blog with any regularity knows that I absolutely love music. I remain convinced that I was born to be a rock star and simply took a wrong turn somewhere along the way. Writing has become my creative outlet instead.

The parallel became clearest to me during the seventh and eighth episodes of the series which focus on the music history of Seattle and New York City. Dave interviewed people involved in Seattle’s grunge scene of the 90s to talk about bands like Nirvana and the punk rockers of the 70s in NYC such as The Ramones. What all of them kept turning back to was that none of them made music back then with any real hope of financial success. They weren’t playing in garages and dingy clubs because they expected record deals or legions of fans. They simply played because they loved making music. Many of them weren’t particularly talented musicians either. They just had a passionate need to share their feelings and ideas through their songs.

This reminds me of the self-published authors of today. Sure, most of them aren’t very good. In fact, many are downright awful. But they love what they do. And the best of them have a raw sense of urgency, a sort of blue collar beauty that you just won’t often find in the pages of traditionally published literary fiction or the sterilized world of mass manufactured genre work. After all, the big publishing companies are businesses. By their nature, they need to focus on the bottom line. Experimentation doesn’t typically go over very well with stockholders.

So it’s typically left to the self-published and small press writers to push the boundaries. They can take chances with characters, narratives, styles and structures that other authors just can’t. No, it doesn’t always work, but it’s fun to try and once in a while, something truly special is the result.

So does my self-published work stand above the crowd? I’d like to think so, but ultimately that’s up to you, the reader, to decide. In between working on those longer pieces, I’ll keep riffing here on my blog, playing my own personal brand of rock and roll.