home authors guest shorts graphical shorts
Really, truly fantastic poets, novelists, essayists, and all other kinds of near perfect writers possess within them a true passion for their work which is disbursed throughout the final product. What I mean to say is, elite writers include a lot of themselves in what they create. There is a lot of the author himself in the final object, "within these pages please find the man himself" that kind of thing. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but you understand.
In regards to Graylick Dramblegumper and his most distinct flaw as a writer and person; his true self is missing. The characters displayed the normal gambit of the human condition such as valor, love, hate, hope, dreams, jealousy and whatnot, but not one of them had any real soul, no spark of life. This method of writing can be used as a literary device if one wishes to convey bleakness, or a void, or something which one typically associates with sterility, such as gauze. Due to the type of books he enjoyed writing, the adventurey type, Graylick didn't pay much mind to the single dimension, the vacuousness of his characters. In fairness, they were normally dodging and jumping and escaping from dangerous places by the skin of their teeth and such activities leave very little time for personal exploration, but if they stood still long enough it would be plainly obvious that these characters were mere husks, devoid of humanity.
In the circle of peers which served as Mr. Dramblegumper's most honest and caring critics, this soullessness was seen as a very distressing shortcoming. This shortcoming was not only reflected in the work, but as I mentioned, in the man as well. This was something which he struggled with both as an artist and person. It simply wasn't in him to 'be' him, on the page or otherwise.
When at last he was able to produce a book to which he was able to infuse his very heart and soul, it was discovered that the heart and soul of Graylick Dramblegumper were utterly disgusting. It seems Graylick Dramblegumper is without peer in the category of "the least attractive things anyone should wish to be". Let me please restate this another way, for it cannot be in the slightest bit downplayed - Graylick Dramblegumper turned out be so awful, so devoid of value as a person, so absolutely foul, putrid, feculent, and horrible, people who read the book in the which characters reflected his heart and soul so perfectly died from reading it. Like Monty Python's 'funniest joke', people were literally dropping dead in their chairs. It wasn't just the words that killed the reader, it was what those words said, or meant, about Graylick Dramblegumper - the man turned out to be quite toxic.
Date Written: March 20, 2005
Author: Templeton Dink
Average Vote: 4