Dear Hipster, popularity doesn't like you either.

A disturbingly large number of my college friends were hipsters.  I won’t bother mentioning their names in this blog because they’re pretty obscure people and you probably haven’t heard of them anyway.  They would stare at me from behind their hipster glasses while wearing their hipster sweaters and drinking their hipster beverages (Code Red Mountain Dew?  I don’t know) and laugh when I talked about still liking Hootie and the Blowfish or Blues Traveler.  I remember a time when I mentioned preferring the remake of “Such Great Heights” by Iron and Wine to the original.  This was met with a response of “No.”  Not a discussion of what they preferred and why, or even a questioning of why I liked the cover… just a flat out “No, the original is better.”  Sadly, I spent a lot of time being an anti-hipster.  I avoided bands like Postal Decemberists for Cutie just because I didn’t want to be one of those douche bags that harped on and on about them.  I would listen to them if the opportunity arose, but I definitely didn’t buy their albums. 

I’ve found that readers (myself included) are much the same.  There’s a fine line between genre-preference and elitism.  I love fantasy.  It is far and above my favorite genre.  Ever since reading Elvenbane by Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton, I have had little taste for less thrilling-fare.  Does this mean I’ve avoided literature or turned my nose up at people I caught reading classics like Dickens or modern greats like Stephen King?  Not at all.  I would not have survived my Master’s program if I couldn’t make my way through a bevy of American and British literature courses.  But that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed them nearly as much as a good Eberron novel or the latest Aaron Allston Star Wars book.   

Sadly, I was lying to myself.  My literary hipsterism knew no bounds.  I spent the better part of the past ten years avoiding the Harry Potter books like the plague.  I had a college degree, after all – two of them! – why did I need to read children’s books?  Well, it turns out I needed to read them because they’re fun.  My wife had read the first of the books ages ago, but hadn’t continued the series.  She was, however, a fan of the movies.  We recently started our own little book club and decided that the 7-work set should be our first selection.  So far I’m three books in a loving it.  It’s fun reading, and sometimes I forget that reading is supposed to be fun.  It might lack Tolkien’s rich descriptions (read: wordy and lengthy), but it has fun with its characters and appeals to a much broader base than just its target audience.  The worth of a novel is something for a future entry… this one’s getting too long already.

But you know what else?  J.K. Rowling wrote a book… heck she wrote seven of them!  Not only did she finish them all; she also got them published.  It’s really easy to sit back as a reader and scoff at other’s creations.  It’s worse as an aspiring writer.  We like to lay around reading books that make us feel better about ourselves or blasting them with our Amazon.com reviews, meanwhile producing no great work of fiction of our own.  I greatly look forward to the day I can drop “aspiring” from what I call myself.  Too often, we would-be authors just dream of what it would be like to be a writer.  We have dreams and ideas, but do nothing with them.  Sure, not every one of us should be writing professionally, but either crap or get off the pot, right?  I’ve wasted away years wanting to be a writer.  Only recently have I started a daily writing schedule… something, I’m told, is a pre-requisite.  My friend Jefferson (who has a wonderful blogspot blog called the Writings of woRm) told me just last week that he’s looking forward to graduating so that he has more time for writing.  I’ve found that if you wait until you have time for something, you will never make time for it. 

So in closing:  1) Hipsters suck.  2) Read anything and everything… especially popular things to find out WHY they’re popular, they must be doing something right.  You are not yet such a great author that other works are beneath you.  3) Turn off the TV when you get home from work and write… unless it’s a Tuesday.  It’s worth skipping a night of writing to watch Biggest Loser and Parenthood.