Bret Easton Ellis

BretEastonEllis Bret Easton Ellis

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to become afraid of his audience...

 

If anyone asked me where the seeds of my desire to write originated, it would have been soon after I picked up The Rules Of Attraction, in the fall 1988. Pre-Internet days, I only discovered Bret Easton Ellis was by seeing the book in someone else's hands, and asking about it.

 

Sophomore year of college, we were routinely going to the underground club right outside the town my school was located in. The club had initially started out catering to a gay crown, then as the late 80's progressed, it started having Goth/alternative nights, which moved on to eventually the underground/acid house/early rave scene. By October of '88, we were all quite interested in the house music scene that has recently come over from the U.K. to the U.S., so we went to this place, two, three nights a week.

 

I walked in with my friends around 10pm on a Friday - we came in early, as we were underage at the time, and the only way we were getting around being carded was by coming in before the crowds. The doorman sat on a stool, sporting a black eye, and reading a paperback. He was a budding acquaintance, so I asked him about both. He said the black eye was from a fight the previous evening, (Thursday night was the only night of the week the fraternity/sorority folks ever ventured out there - weekends were for their more "organized" binge drinking events). Some idiot had started giving him an attitude over a drink, and my doorman friend wound up fighting the guy with a bat. And hence, the black eye. I asked about the book, (I was intrigued by the cover), and he said it was good, I should read it. Rules of Attraction I thought, what the hell is it about? I had no clue. I initially thought it was a self help book, which I had a hard time imagining a doorman reading.

 

After picking it up at the local independent bookstore, (no Borders or Waldenbooks in small college towns back then), I read it from beginning to end, in about a day, stopping between classes to read a few more pages around campus. Although the characters had been in college a few years prior to myself, it was the first literature that was aimed at Generation X that I had come across. In the late 80's, prior to the information age, books and magazines were the only connection you had to the culture of other 20 something's.

 

I read how he interspersed the characters varying interpretations of the same events. I realized that B.E.E was clearly someone who had lived the story, while at the same time remaining separated, an observer to the events in his own college life, something I understood well. He was that guy at the party that was just as wasted as everyone, but didn't talk as much, because he was busy recording what was happening in his mind.

 

These were Generation X'rs I felt that I knew - smart, nuanced, flawed, experimenting with altering our consciousness - and definitively not a part of the mainstream stereotypical college experience.

 

I don't love all his work, (I'll withhold my commentary on American Psycho for another day), but I love that he tweeted the importance of an artist not being afraid of their audience. Whether you love everything he's written or not, he's clearly never let his fear of reader response halt the brilliance of his style. I wasted a lot of time *not* writing, precisely because I think I've spent more time worrying about how my writing would be taken instead of just putting words to paper, (so to speak).

 

There are probably many potential amazing authors out there who will never share their talent for the same reasons. I'm determined to always remind myself that that if I'm going to write, I must write what I feel first, and worry about its reception, (if I'm going to concern myself with it at all), later. Letting go of holding back on your art is probably something that contributes to your overall well being. If you constantly censor your thoughts, art, work, etc, for fear of not being considered good enough, appropriate, whatever, you're holding back on your development as a complete human being.