A Quote by Chuck Klosterman
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
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I think of the medium as a people-to-people medium, not cameraman-to-people, not direction-to-people, not writers-to-people, but people-to-peopleYou can only involve an audience with people. You can't involve them with gimmicks, with sunsets, with hand-held cameras, zoom shots, or anything else. They couldn't care less about those things. But you give them something to worry about, some person they can worry about, and care about, and you've got them, you've got them involved.
I think most of us, as writers, have had experiences where you get edited and it doesn't feel like your voice at all. And so it's been nice to go through the experience of having a lot wind up on the cutting-room floor, and yet still feel that your voice is being - not purified, but made more yourself. I think that's a very rare thing.
With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it
I think a lot why our lives shows are good is because of the crowd, and because of the energy that they bring. Also, there was a time when a lot of the people that came to our shows were a bunch of drunk bros. At a certain point, we decided we were going to start calling them out. We also decided to become more gay-positive and feminist and all that stuff, and that we were going to be really vocal about it. After that, our crowd became a lot friendlier, and honestly a lot more fun.
And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
It was always about the future of writers, and about the way writers are treated in the future, and I think that was really hurtful to a lot of people in my position who had 160 people who depended on them to get this over with. So there was a lot of pain in it, and in that sense it will never be worth it, but I do think it was important.
Part of my evolution has been to learn how painful most people's childhoods are. They grow up not liking themselves, not loving themselves. Ask people if they were lovable the minute they were born, and watch them sit back and have to think about it. One lady said, 'I suppose so.' That's painful.
The Voice did not consider itself a conventional magazine. It took me awhile to realize that it was named The Voice for a reason. They wanted voices. At the time, good magazine stories were still believed to be written in the third person based on the false belief they were more objective. Of course some conventional stories require third person, but in the really interesting stories - the ones I got do to at The Voice and Esquire - were about subjectivity, subjectivities.
Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future...Omni was sui generis. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years...Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at.
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. Norman Mailer and Vidal, the same thing. The bestselling writers now, there's no great animal energy with them.
You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.
I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.
I think everyone has a story to tell. Part of what I do is help artists find their voice, not only their vocal voice, but their writing voice. Every artist that I worked with who has those records that everyone talks about, they are also writers. I like to say I helped support whatever their writing was so people heard the song clearly.
One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.
Before I went to boarding school, I had never read a fashion magazine. I grew up on a council estate in London, and fashion magazines were a luxury item that weren't even on my mind. The closest I got to a fashion magazine was my cousin's 'Top of the Pops' magazines, where we would learn the lyrics to every song and put posters on our walls.
I worry an awful lot about people and how they're faring. When I worry about people, whether their job is squashing their spirit, pushing them into a darker pathway of not feeling good about their life, that forces me to look for what's good. What's going well. That stokes a lot of positive feelings. Although I do worry, I look for the hope.
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