Guest Post: Trey Knarr

For today's post, Trey Knarr has generously offered to share his writing experience and prove some insight into why honesty is so important in art. Dig in!



HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY

I’m writing this – late at night, a healthy number of Budweisers in, with a looming sense of the baby’s awakening – on a computer, the space bar of which has gone MIA (well, it just kind of fell off; I was there). However, every word I type is exactly as I intend it.

The point I’m making is that the paragraph above features something many writers (especially beginning ones) tend to overlook: that guttural, cathartic, “from-the-heart” style the late Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson exuded with such perfect naturality. When did the strutting class of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) devolve into the limping crass of Twilight (2005)?

And if your answer was “Between 1897 and 2005,” well, technically, you’re right.

I can forgive modern art, to an extent. For all the havoc Justin Bieber has wreaked upon this world, at least you or I can’t acknowledge (well, won’t want to admit, at least) that he isn’t telling the truth. Love, “swag,” Michael Jackson-rip-offs: doesn’t everybody want these things (and only these things) throughout those troublesome, hormonal, adolescent years?

All kidding aside, many writers, including yours truly, went through a sort of bohemian existence and favored rational derangement of the senses in an attempt to produce high art that was somehow closer to an unrealistic idea of what art should be. In the years that followed, I have come to believe that honesty rules all. Like the great blues singers, it ain’t about what you’re preaching; rather, how you preach it.