An Honest Start

Hello, and welcome.

This is the personal blog of C.B. Vollendorff. 

I’ve tried to maintain a personal blog before, but my approach was wrong. Sure, I was getting a few hundred hits a month (not bad, for an unknown wannabe). Sure, I had a content schedule complete with article ideas and potential projects. Sure, I used stock photos and SEO best practices to help improve my SERP results. I had everything a young writer should have on a personal blog, but my approach was wrong. Completely wrong. Like, one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. My initial approach to a personal blog was twofold: keep a running blog on the internet to impress future employers and, essentially, to show off. These reasons are sound enough, but it took me a long time to realize these shallow reasons would slowly be my undoing.

After months and months spending so much time writing vacuous bullshit, I realized my heart wasn’t in my content. It was dull, self-important drivel. If you’ve ever put your intellect on blast for the whole internet to see, you’d know how devastating it can be to realize just how shitty and cringe your blog is.

I realized that my early attempts at blogging, while innocuous enough, didn’t come from fertile soil, so to speak. It was built on the wrong foundation, postulated on incorrect data. This blog, unlike the last two, will seek to rectify that problem. Instead of being planted in the dead and decaying soil of Ego, this blog will be strongly rooted in honest expression. So, with that introduction, let’s jump into it.

Steven King once said something like: a story never starts from a theme. The theme, or overall message, of a piece of writing is inherent within the context of the story. I’m butchering the actual quote, but the information here is basically the same. I believe this applies to not only writing fiction, but to artistic pursuits in general. Art, in my mind, no matter the form or medium, should be a means of authentic self-expression.

This can take the form of a shitpost meme, a finger-painting, a podcast—whatever. If the art is successful, it should resonate with the audience and the emotion or idea behind the art should feel honest, believable—and to some degree, relatable. Honest expression generally leads to the creation of art that stands the test of time. Pushing or forcing ideas, messages and themes rarely leads to successful or engaging art. That would be propaganda. 

Art, on the other hand, can or might have a message or theme contained within, but generally speaking, the purpose of art isn’t to push an idea down anyone’s throat. Good art tells a story. Art that lasts throughout the ages tells a story with a lesson, theme or meaning hidden within. Similar to the tradition of ancient Teutonic vitkis, a good artist codes thematic messages within their art. They tuck it behind personal interpretation, more like the unseen digital reading of an RFID chip than a large scale signal-fire.

Now, this doesn’t mean an artist can’t create art or content with a message in mind. What I am saying is art that sticks around the longest, and the artists who’ve gone down in history generally don’t put the message before the art. They don’t try and guide the audience’s engagement with the content.

Within the context of my own writing career, I’m guilty of putting the message before the art, no doubt. I wasn’t aware of this problem at first. In fact, due to a glaring lack of self-awareness, I felt for the first time that my art was headed in a positive direction (because I wanted it to feel like that). That’s what ego will do to ya. I was putting a false message before my art. I was projecting my ego through my art instead of letting the audience engage with my mode of honest expression.

To provide a little context, while growing up, reading was my mental escape from the living nightmare that was my actual reality. Most kids had video games, but I was too poor, so I read books. Any book. I liked the big ones best because it meant I could potentially spend multiple days (weeks!) away in some foreign land, some magical realm far away from Brea, California and my hellish life. 

So, for reasons of pure escapism, I had gained a college-level reading comprehension by 5th grade. This inherent skill made it pretty clear to me what I wanted to do when I grew up—I wanted to craft universes, worlds and people all my own. I wanted to wield the power to send the reader’s imagination off to another dimension, and at a very young age, I was instilled with a sense of duty toward becoming a writer. I would use my talent for reading and writing to tell the world my stories!

Then, after attending Full Sail, I was drunk on the idea of actually being able to pursue a creative career. However, by this time, the initial sense of duty that fueled my existence was all but forgotten. I soaked up everything I could about professionalism, branding, producing consistent content, how to market myself. I was dead set on being a “ professional writer” (whatever the fuck that means), and a successful one at that. I told myself I’d do anything to get myself ahead in my art career. What I didn’t know was I would eventually sacrifice my dignity in a vain attempt to obtain this abstract goal.

What I hadn’t taken the time to consider, even for a second, was the true nature of my magnetic attraction to writing. In the race to adulthood, I forgot this simple fact, and it ended up costing me, big time. I didn’t, in fact, want to write so I could change the world (a naïve idea I adopted by reading and studying liberal politics), and I didn’t want to change people’s lives with hard-hitting intellectual prose. I just wanted to give people a good time. An escape. I forgot this and my writing and sense of identity faltered.

This was proven to me over the course of months through the various and multiple failures of my writing. Despite being a full-time copywriter for a telecommunication firm at the ripe age of 23, my fiction was failing, my blog was shit and I hated myself because of it. Something was off. Somewhere down the road, my writing stopped being a mode of honest expression and started becoming a way to prove I was, in fact, an adult now with a career and money and health insurance and all the other bullshit status symbols we chase as adults.

Luckily, psychedelic drug use, stumbling upon paganism as a religion, and hours of good, honest conversation with intelligent friends helped me Remember. I was eventually able to unpack what, exactly, I was trying to achieve with my writing. It helped me remember why I even set this whack-ass goal for myself in the first place. Days spent meditating and thinking, writing and reading restored my sense of cosmic duty.

To that end, this blog is another arm of the practice of authentic expression. I’m done trying to impress potential employers and non-existent humans.I’m done trying to prove to people that I’m highly intelligent. I’ll let those aspects of my life shine through my art, like the heat produced from coals left lingering long after the fire has died. 

Join me, Dear Reader, in my journey of authentic expression. Hopefully, what is written here will inspire you to think. Hopefully, my mode of authentic expression holds some sort of value in your life. If it doesn’t, whatever. I’ll keep writing anyway. I’ll keep embodying the archetype of the warrior-poet, I’ll keep reading and studying the craft, even at the cost of my social image and what future employers, friends and family think of me. All that matters to me is expressing myself honestly and authentically, thereby becoming one of the best writers of this generation.

Hail, to a life lived in honest artistic expression!