In 1986, the band Chicago found themselves at a bit of a crossroads as a band. Their lead singer, whose songwriting and drive had allowed them to have a couple of massive hit albums in the first half of the 1980s, Peter Cetera, had wanted to record a solo album, and this led to his acrimonious departure from the group. The band sought to replace him with another singer–one Jason Scheff, who sang as the lead singer on the three biggest singles released from the album, a remake of “25 Or 6 To 4” that had originally been released during the 1970s heyday of the band, “Will You Still Love Me?” and the quirky “If She Would Have Been Faithful…” Despite the fact that three songs on the album hit the top 50, the album only went gold and, relatively speaking at least, was considered a flop, leading the group to sing Diane Warren songs for the remainder of the decade and into the next decade until the wheels fell off of their mainstream popularity as their album “Stones of Sisyphus” was shelved for fourteen years. For those who are not aware, “25 Or 6 To 4” is a song about the process of writing songs late at night as an insomniac, an affliction that many creative people have to deal with, and points to the artistic side of the group in feeling proud of having written so many of its own material during more than a decade of popularity as a mainstream rock band that blended jazz, pop, and rock together in a generally accessible package.

I started writing as a child and have been writing fairly voluminously since about the age of thirteen or so in a variety of genres, ranging from poetry to plays to essays to prose fiction about a wide variety of subjects. The vast majority of my writing is self-directed. I write about what I choose to write about. If anyone happens upon what I have written and chooses to read what I have written or comment about it, they are free to do so. Those times when I have written for magazines or journals or newspapers, this has not been the case, and it has often involved difficult and unpleasant bouts of edits and messages being sent back and forth about organization and structure and the finer points of wording about one or another of my points. I absolutely loathe the process of editing that I have been a part of, where it takes months to work on the wording of an essay that is 1000 words or so, where sometimes whole paragraphs are moved around out of order and worked on and where sometimes one has to go back because while the initial editor liked one wording, the reading committee that read it after him liked the way things were before, which undid months of frustrating effort along a particular line, all to publish an article that few people will ever remember. When this painful process is compared with the joy one feels when tens of thousands of people have read and presumably appreciated an essay that one banged out in 30 minutes while one was waiting on a truck to arrive to take one to a bus station for a trip, it is easy to understand the appeal of writing independently and the irritation involved in having to work with others.

One of the more troubling aspects of contemporary law is how little of it is written by members of Congress. While I am by no means someone who has a high opinion of the law-writing abilities of members of Congress, such people do work under the advantage of being subject to the pleasure of the people, and if they write bad laws and vote to pass bad laws, they can be removed from office at the next election and replaced hopefully with people with a bit more sense and more responsiveness to the well-being of the voting public. For decades now, though, members of Congress have abdicated their responsibility to write laws and regulations to people who work in government agencies who are not subject to the pleasure of anyone at all, not even their nominal bosses like the President of the United States. This is immensely dangerous, as one can often read laws that are passed (if one wants to help treat one’s insomnia) that allow the specifics of a law and its enforcement to be set by regulatory agencies passed sight unseen by members of Congress who are told that they have to pass a law to find out what is written in the law. This is patently absurd. Who is to say that some corrupt faceless bureaucrat in some obscure government agency could not write regulations at 3AM that harm the well-being and take away the treasured freedoms of ordinary people with no accountability and no recourse whatsoever?

How are these problems connected? All of them deal with, in different but related ways, to the struggles that are involved when the independent creator has to deal with a larger world outside. It is easy to create as a solitary individual. All one needs is to put pen to paper or to type words, or to make sounds on a musical instrument, or any other number of creative acts, and one has made a creation on one’s own. But that is seldom enough. People want their creations to be read by others, to be recognized as important and worthwhile, to be published, to be made official in some fashion, and this of necessity involves the independent creator with some sort of accountability to larger institutions. Those institutions are not staffed often by people who are particularly friendly to intensely creative and quirky individuals, but are usually staffed by people who take comfort in the usual and who like what is tried and true, what everyone else does and how everyone else approaches things, which some people are simply unable to do. Whenever we have to work with other people, our creative vision becomes something that has to be struggled over and weighed and balanced with our desire to gain attention or to profit from our creations. If we do not care about the reception our work receives, we need not work with anyone else at all, but to the extent that we do care about that reception, we are forced to work with others, communicate with others, and deal with others in ways and matters that may be frustrating to everyone involved. Hopefully the end result is worth it.