First Post and Ex Machina

I've been agonizing  for a few days now over what my first post should be (months, if you count the time I spent procrastinating about actually setting up the blog). I'm usually a fairly quiet, understated person, and I do my best to go unnoticed. For this reason, having a blog does seem somewhat... counter intuitive. Why should people care what I have to say? Who is even going to read it? What would they think if they did?

Then it clicked. I realized it really didn't matter who read it. Why? Because, at least as of right now, there is nobody reading it! The only people who know about this page as of right now are my family (hi mom!).

They say dance like nobody's watching. I say write like nobody's reading. This is the only way to write. As with all art, writing must come from the heart. Write for yourself, whether you're writing fiction, poetry, essays, or blog posts.

Continuing on this tangent, I decided to share one of the best examples I've read recently of a writer following his own heart, breaking many a convention in the process. Jonathan Ball's Ex Machina examines the nature of fiction, dissecting the relationship between author and reader. Written in the manner of a choose-your-own-adventure, the book is a narrative poem of interconnected philosophical statements and rhetorical questions that act with the reader to create three separate stories. In Ball's book, the reader is as key to the creation of these stories as the author.

Admittedly, I found it very difficult to discern three distinct narratives. The book is short. I read the book cover to cover abut half a dozen times in one sitting, and found a different story each time. There are hundreds of ways to read Ex Machina. The end result is the same. Ball highlights the inherently contrived nature of fiction, by removing the human element. Deus Ex Machina translates from Greek to "god from the machine". Ex Machina removes the god, leaving us with the machine running rampant; we are given half the story, forced to act as god, fulfilling the missing link in order to create a story.

Ex Machina is an incredibly bizarre and unsettling reading experience, but a supremely satisfying one. In my opinion, anything that draws an emotional reaction in the reader, either good or bad, is a success in my mind. Ex Machina is a short book, one you could easily read several times in an afternoon. Seriously, give it a try. You'll thank me for it.