![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Writing...or rather my insecurities regarding it
I remember a conversation I had many years ago with a drawing professor in college, who told me that most of the talented artists she'd known rarely had their work displayed in galleries or museums and remained unknown. While flash-in-the-pan commericial artists's work hung on walls, much like the gallery we were visiting on that particular field trip - one of many. She was unimpressed with the work, which I realize now was forgettable and tended to be on the "trendy" or "shock" side of the fence as opposed to being something that spoke to one's soul. Much like Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" or for that matter, Mitch Albom's "Tuesday's With Morrie" or Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code." Commericial successes, entertaining, but forgettable.
The reason for this, she stated, is the good artists simply do not know how to market themselves. They cannot figure out how to charm the gallery owner or obtain the interest of the museum rep. They are artists not salesmen or marketers and it takes a salesman to sell art. At the time, I thought she was being a tad defensive, I still think that to a degree, but I also agree with her - having seen my fair share of gallery exhibits.
This memory, over eighteen years old now, comes to me tonight while reading Marcel Proust's By Way of Swann's or more popularly known, Swann's Way - where Proust, although we are divided by more than a century, pinpoints a fear or if you will an insecurity that has been plaguing me for quite some time. A fear, I think, that plagues all true writers. Not the ones who mutter about how they'd write if it weren't for the kids, the job, or their social lives getting in the way. Not the ones who dream of being the next Stephen King or wrote stories as a young adult but grew out of it to pursue more fruitful work. But the one's who write no matter what, regardless of whether they are being paid or applauded for their output, often in spite of the fact they aren't and half fearing/half yearning for a day that they will be. Finding a minute or an hour each week or each month to scratch something down. Who are constantly writing, twisting and struggling with words, like a potter struggles to sculpt clay and curses each splattered ruin, but keeps placing it on the wheel, or a jeweler screams at the wrong bend of wire or the smashed bead, but threads the bead on the wire again, or the knitter curses that skipped loop. And we are never ever quite satisfied with them. Always thinking somehow someway the final product could be better. Half fearing to send it out to a reader, but unable not to, for every true writer yearns to be read and to be immortalized by their words. To know their words pierced some stranger's brain, and for a moment communicated a thought that spans more than one dimension.
In the following passage - Proust puts in far better words than I can convey what I've been feeling regarding my own writing the last few months and in most particular today. A feeling that made me consider, in a fit of self-disgust and artistic self-loathing, to delete everything I've posted online that I could possibly find. Removing the horror from thine eyes. It passed, before I did it. As it often does. But the shadow, the echo of the feeling remains ghostlike and hovering in the air.
[It's on pages 176-178 of Combray, I've bolded the passages that spoke to me.]
She would make me tell the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.
...perhaps my lack of talent, the black hole that opened in my mind when I looked for the subject of my future writings, was also merely an illusion without substance, and this illusion would cease through the intervention of my father, who must have agreed with the government and Providence that I would be the foremost writer of the day. But at other times, as my parents grew impatient at the sight of me lingering behind and not following them, my present life, instead of seeming to me an artificial creation of my father's that he could modify as he liked, appeared to me on the contrary to be included in a reality that had not been made for me, against which there was no recourse, within which I had no ally, which concealed nothing beyond itself. At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, discouraged, I would give up literature forever, despite the encouragement I had been given by Bloch. This intimate immediate awareness I had of the worthlessness of my ideas prevailed against all the praise that might be heaped on me, as do, in a wicked man whose good deeds are usniversally commended, the gualms of his conscience.
The reason for this, she stated, is the good artists simply do not know how to market themselves. They cannot figure out how to charm the gallery owner or obtain the interest of the museum rep. They are artists not salesmen or marketers and it takes a salesman to sell art. At the time, I thought she was being a tad defensive, I still think that to a degree, but I also agree with her - having seen my fair share of gallery exhibits.
This memory, over eighteen years old now, comes to me tonight while reading Marcel Proust's By Way of Swann's or more popularly known, Swann's Way - where Proust, although we are divided by more than a century, pinpoints a fear or if you will an insecurity that has been plaguing me for quite some time. A fear, I think, that plagues all true writers. Not the ones who mutter about how they'd write if it weren't for the kids, the job, or their social lives getting in the way. Not the ones who dream of being the next Stephen King or wrote stories as a young adult but grew out of it to pursue more fruitful work. But the one's who write no matter what, regardless of whether they are being paid or applauded for their output, often in spite of the fact they aren't and half fearing/half yearning for a day that they will be. Finding a minute or an hour each week or each month to scratch something down. Who are constantly writing, twisting and struggling with words, like a potter struggles to sculpt clay and curses each splattered ruin, but keeps placing it on the wheel, or a jeweler screams at the wrong bend of wire or the smashed bead, but threads the bead on the wire again, or the knitter curses that skipped loop. And we are never ever quite satisfied with them. Always thinking somehow someway the final product could be better. Half fearing to send it out to a reader, but unable not to, for every true writer yearns to be read and to be immortalized by their words. To know their words pierced some stranger's brain, and for a moment communicated a thought that spans more than one dimension.
In the following passage - Proust puts in far better words than I can convey what I've been feeling regarding my own writing the last few months and in most particular today. A feeling that made me consider, in a fit of self-disgust and artistic self-loathing, to delete everything I've posted online that I could possibly find. Removing the horror from thine eyes. It passed, before I did it. As it often does. But the shadow, the echo of the feeling remains ghostlike and hovering in the air.
[It's on pages 176-178 of Combray, I've bolded the passages that spoke to me.]
She would make me tell the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.
...perhaps my lack of talent, the black hole that opened in my mind when I looked for the subject of my future writings, was also merely an illusion without substance, and this illusion would cease through the intervention of my father, who must have agreed with the government and Providence that I would be the foremost writer of the day. But at other times, as my parents grew impatient at the sight of me lingering behind and not following them, my present life, instead of seeming to me an artificial creation of my father's that he could modify as he liked, appeared to me on the contrary to be included in a reality that had not been made for me, against which there was no recourse, within which I had no ally, which concealed nothing beyond itself. At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, discouraged, I would give up literature forever, despite the encouragement I had been given by Bloch. This intimate immediate awareness I had of the worthlessness of my ideas prevailed against all the praise that might be heaped on me, as do, in a wicked man whose good deeds are usniversally commended, the gualms of his conscience.
no subject
This bit is SO MY DILEMMA:
. Wow. I'm writhing around on that pin like whoa.
no subject
And exactly. I read that quote last night in Swann's Way - the new translation by Lydia Davis, and sat bolt upright in bed. Grabbed my lap-top and quickly transcribed it. Because it so perfectly explains what is driving me crazy regarding my own writing and why I can't stop writing.
no subject
Oddly, Proust reminds me of Wesley, driven to live up to his parents' expectations and crippled by self-doubt. And yet for all his ambivalence, he created great literature. More importantly, he didn't stop writing.