My name is Larry Griffin. I am a Florida-based writer, journalist and comedian, and this is a new blog to showcase my attempts to write fiction stories. I'm trying to better myself in the craft. You hear over and over again that practice makes perfect and you write more and more until you get good. That's what I'm aiming at.
I started writing when I was a very young child, originally wanting to draw - but I realized very early that drawing takes a lot of time and patience. Time and patience that I didn't really have in me, because the thing I wanted to actually spend my time and patience on was telling stories - I remember drawing all these comic books when I was like 9 or 10 years old, just real amateur, kid stuff the way kids tend to do. I got older and I realized what I wanted to do was write and tell stories. I sucked back then. I think you'd have to be some kind of prodigal child to not suck when you start out.
I thought I was good in college when I really started expanding my literary horizons and reading all these classics and all these new exciting books. I really thought, man, I've made it now, I'll surely get published with fiction soon and it'll be good. But hindsight is 20/20. I think now that the work I did in my late teens and very early 20s was good but I was focusing too much on the mechanics of it, the writing process - getting my sentences and paragraphs and words to look and feel superficially like those of my literary idols - Hemingway, Lehane, King, et. al. The soul was missing. I see that now.
So this is my new thing to show my evolution. I've got one story, Faces, published already, which I'll throw in a separate post. I think we all glorify ourselves in these blogs, make ourselves sound so important and what not. There's so many voices now that it's insane to think that anything we post on a blog is gonna be somehow recognized by anything more than our friends and family. I have no delusions of grandeur with this - read it if you will, but I don't want this to turn into this whole deal where I act like I'm more important than I really am.
At the same time, though, maybe our internet age has brought on some good by having these blogs and these mirrors for us all to feel important. Feeling important is good. It's cathartic to have a blog where we can just write and ramble. Maybe it'll help my writing to post it on this thing even if no one reads it for a very long time. I dunno. Let's give it a shot.
