Frank Kogan

Fwiw, my writing used to be way more first-person wildman than it is now, and I'm not sure of all the reasons for the change - one for sure in regard to my lj is that I've decided that writing about what is interesting in my offline life would entail too much violation of people's privacy. But also, in my writing, there's a never-ending struggle for a writer's "voice" that sounds true (so everything I write is part of this personal struggle), and for the moment I'm finding my voice more when I'm losing myself in the subject matter than when I'm at the center of the story. And where I do want to intrude myself it seems to come from the ghosts of Frank's past - e.g., in talking about the Beatles 1964 I want to jump in and say, "Look, I was there, and the Beatles were not just lovable moptops, they were a dangerous, threatening lot who tore up my world." When you're ten your world is more prone to be torn up by a song than it is when you're fifty-five. But the Beatles tore up the world for a lot of fifty-five-year-olds too, I'll wager.