WRITER’S EMBARRASSMENT
mortification
One time I saw the film director Paul Thomas Anderson give a talk to a small group of college students. A burly male student made the mistake of asking a question that went something like, “My problem is that I feel embarrassed to show my work to people. Do you have that problem?”
Anderson, who is amiable, boyish, and easygoing in person, scoffed a bit and said that if what you produce is interesting, then it should cause you embarrassment, at least to a certain degree, because it should contain elements that are personal and feel private. I agree and think it applies to artists in all art forms, particularly ones that rely heavily on narrative, like film and novels. Some things I’ve written and published embarrass me in that sense. (Others in the sense that in retrospect I think they suck, but that’s a different kind of embarrassment.) The embarrassment is acceptable and healthy.
Thing is, in the Age of Overshare, exposure of the personal/private is a badge of honor. The more you expose of yourself, the more attention you get, and attention is currency. Does that incentive system devalue the personal/private as a creative resource? How can you feel embarrassed if everybody’s getting applause for cataloging their masturbation sessions while pushing a comforting and collectively reinforced fiction that having done so is in some way provocative or daring? If the stakes are vapors, what’s the point? And is there in fact value in having a sense that you’re taking a personal risk–even if it’s just of humiliation–by writing what you’re writing?
Tags: embarrassment, paul thomas anderson
Why did the burly student make ‘a mistake’ in asking that question?
you have to risk more than mere self-exposure, and seek more than mere embarrassment – but you can’t be afraid of those things either – anderson is right though, often they are good guides, especially for younger writers who are generally too afraid of self-exposure to say anything true, or to even see language as a thing beyond the constructor of their social coolness. people should be encouraged to catalog their masturbation sessions to get over those walls and fences, then be encouraged to move on, and seek unvaporous stakes
i do think that no matter how old or wise you are, when you write something that makes you afraid of showing it to others, a little alarm bell should go off in your head alerting you that you might have written something good. might because it’s no guarantee. the only way i have found to tell if something is embarrassing because it is interesting or because it sucks is to let a bunch of time wash over it
it took me years before i worked up the guts to show my poetry to my parents. and then i said, “here. you can read this, but please don’t talk to me about it.”
what causes artists/writers to choose to seek nerve exposure? it has to be something more than simply “the desire to create something interesting.”
i really like anderson’s quote about the personal and private elements of our work. it makes me feel a little bit better.
When it comes to being the Age of Overexposure, i try to worry about what others are doing and just focus on myself. i’m not ignorant enough to say “good writing is all the exposure you’ll need,” but i think it really comes down to how comfortable you are being who you are. that’s about all we can do anyway.
i have trouble letting members of my family or non-writer friends read my stuff.
i’ve forbidden my mom from reading the suburban swindle. not that there’s anything so terrible in it. it would just be too weird.
“The more you expose of yourself, the more attention you get, and attention is currency. Does that incentive system devalue the personal/private as a creative resource?”
I often wonder when/how Therapy Culture wove its DNA strands in with Writing; I think this deadly (for Fiction) process started sometime in the 1970s with all those Confessional Poem Assignments and cheerfully-Birkenstocked, unisex teachers blabbing on about Self Expression as though it were a Civil Right (and the rainbow-colored key to mental health)…
Writers who “expose themselves” in so-called Fiction are self-medicating with text. All personal experience is Art Fodder but if you regurgitate it in undigested chunks the first thing you’ll notice is how limited (and familiar) the pallet is. To extend that metaphor: when a real writer eats KFC, she shits diamonds and light bulbs. And she isn’t even embarrassed by it.
I don’t think you can worry too much about “the zeitgeist” or whatever, but I do think different things will be productive/embarrassing over time. Sure, there’s incentive to overshare, but some things people want to hear about and others they don’t. The latter is usually more fertile ground, and people will find it.
I don’t think you can worry too much about “the zeitgeist” or whatever, but I do think different things will be productive/embarrassing over time. Sure, there’s incentive to overshare, but some things people want to hear about and others they don’t. The latter is usually more fertile ground, and people will find it.
Christian Parenti invited me and a pal over to his house for Christmas dinner. This was a decade ago, it was Jewmas, and I didn’t have anything better to do.
He had just finished writing this book on the ‘surveillance state’ and was lecturing the turkey, ham and the rest of us, on the dangers this posed for us. I held up my fork and asked him, “why are you worried about that, when there are going to be cameras on every cell phone within five years?”
Well, it’s been a decade and I never even hear about that book. Instead, it’s reality tv and cult of personality shiterati all the time. We surveil ourselves for aberrations, in the hopes of finding the next taboo.
Shame is there for a reason. Every libertine period is followed by a conservative crack-down. Those at the top now shall be brought low; the low shall stay low of course.
Christian Parenti invited me and a pal over to his house for Christmas dinner. This was a decade ago, it was Jewmas, and I didn’t have anything better to do.
He had just finished writing this book on the ‘surveillance state’ and was lecturing the turkey, ham and the rest of us, on the dangers this posed for us. I held up my fork and asked him, “why are you worried about that, when there are going to be cameras on every cell phone within five years?”
Well, it’s been a decade and I never even hear about that book. Instead, it’s reality tv and cult of personality shiterati all the time. We surveil ourselves for aberrations, in the hopes of finding the next taboo.
Shame is there for a reason. Every libertine period is followed by a conservative crack-down. Those at the top now shall be brought low; the low shall stay low of course.
My question is the same as Dan’s. What was the student’s “mistake” in asking that question?
My question is the same as Dan’s. What was the student’s “mistake” in asking that question?
I’ve been calling myself a closet-case. I have consistently stroked poetry clandestinely for sixteen years, but only under three years ago did I actually tell a single soul, having (ahem) won two prizes from an esteemed literary University (despite studying science). It still feels flutterlike to put it to talk, and I think the lack of peers makes it more volatile also, (hence here I am, a blinking somber beacon), and so seeing some of these shrews shred on some of these other threads makes me ponder a retreat to carapace. Please, I’m no hippy (but if you looked at me, you’d laugh), but some of us (I posit: all?) yearn for holding hands. That a high-five is a surrogate, to some, for real intimate “i like you” and embrace — it’s no different from all the humansyncrosies that plague our integer society. I swallow my ire, but still invite you to help tend the dwindling twinkling fire.
An adage I’ve assembled: “getting older is getting over being embarassed”. I find this easier and easier the closer I come to being killed. Still, this is no way to wave to the world; we need love and encouragement. I have a theory about “the sad person in the corner of the party” but this post is already too long, what with you twitterflies and finger-pointing at those who self-aggrandize.
I’ve been calling myself a closet-case. I have consistently stroked poetry clandestinely for sixteen years, but only under three years ago did I actually tell a single soul, having (ahem) won two prizes from an esteemed literary University (despite studying science). It still feels flutterlike to put it to talk, and I think the lack of peers makes it more volatile also, (hence here I am, a blinking somber beacon), and so seeing some of these shrews shred on some of these other threads makes me ponder a retreat to carapace. Please, I’m no hippy (but if you looked at me, you’d laugh), but some of us (I posit: all?) yearn for holding hands. That a high-five is a surrogate, to some, for real intimate “i like you” and embrace — it’s no different from all the humansyncrosies that plague our integer society. I swallow my ire, but still invite you to help tend the dwindling twinkling fire.
An adage I’ve assembled: “getting older is getting over being embarassed”. I find this easier and easier the closer I come to being killed. Still, this is no way to wave to the world; we need love and encouragement. I have a theory about “the sad person in the corner of the party” but this post is already too long, what with you twitterflies and finger-pointing at those who self-aggrandize.
Writers, or other artists, need to work ABOVE the concept of embarrassment. Meaning, they have to embrace it and then steamroll over that shit!
Writers, or other artists, need to work ABOVE the concept of embarrassment. Meaning, they have to embrace it and then steamroll over that shit!
Years ago, when I first started writing, I used to write stories to show what a “good” person I was– someone with final morals and the right sociopolitical beliefs. Those were the stories I wanted people to see. But of course those stories were dreck. Then, once I started to trust my writerly instincts enough to shed that “good person” persona, I started to write better stories. But even though they were far from “transgressive,” I didn’t want people to see those stories. Yeah, I wanted them published and out there, but I didn’t want to people to comment on the substance of the stories. (Craft issues, of couse, I could handle discussing.) I’d rather not think why I’m writing the things I do. But Anderson’s right: the more personal and true something is (even if its only true in a subterfuged way), the more we risk embarassment.
Years ago, when I first started writing, I used to write stories to show what a “good” person I was– someone with final morals and the right sociopolitical beliefs. Those were the stories I wanted people to see. But of course those stories were dreck. Then, once I started to trust my writerly instincts enough to shed that “good person” persona, I started to write better stories. But even though they were far from “transgressive,” I didn’t want people to see those stories. Yeah, I wanted them published and out there, but I didn’t want to people to comment on the substance of the stories. (Craft issues, of couse, I could handle discussing.) I’d rather not think why I’m writing the things I do. But Anderson’s right: the more personal and true something is (even if its only true in a subterfuged way), the more we risk embarassment.
I don’t think that’s true.
I don’t think that’s true.
I’ve paraphrased both the student and PTA because this was years ago, but the question and the response had the effect of making the student seem like a dilettante or at least someone lacking the intestinal fortitude to create art and take criticism for the long haul. Certainly you can take issue with my phrasing from a “there are no stupid questions” position, but my recollection of the exchange is that it make the student look pretty naive, and Anderson’s instinctive reaction had a “If you’re serious about what you’re doing, this really shouldn’t be a problem–get over it and create” feel.
Once I finished something I thought my mother would really like, so I sent it to her in draft form. She wouldn’t finish it because she didn’t like it. So I went back to my previous policy–my parents can buy my stuff when it’s published or find it on the internet like anybody else.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a little embarrassed by your work. I think plenty of writers shy away from attention because it is a little humiliating.
One’s ‘art fodder’ is necessarily limited to his personal experience. I was just thinking about this today…. I think a lot of great writers exaggerate certain parts of their personality and then put that warped self in a situation and go from there, introducing that character to other characters which are just people with exaggerated versions of the people that writer knows… etc.
Whether this becomes ‘diamonds and lightbulbs’ or not, it’s all a little embarrassing. But there’s nothing wrong with that.
I mean, part of it is, I guess. But I think there can be a good level of fear of embarrasment–something not embraced. An ulcer of uncertainty. Otherwise artists couldn’t blossom into suicidal geniuses. I’m being crass, but…
“I think a lot of great writers exaggerate certain parts of their personality and then put that warped self in a situation and go from there, introducing that character to other characters which are just people with exaggerated versions of the people that writer knows… etc”
Imagination is (should be) the core reactor of Fiction-making. The exaggeration goes along with mutation, mutilation and transcendence of the Source Material to make Art. Some have made Art from direct transcriptions of their lives, but these are rare cases (Kerouac, as we now know, was Making That Shit Up via Neal Cassady’s stolen experiences)
But I don’t get the “embarrassing” part. Do we honestly think Henry Miller was “embarrassed” about his self-mythologizing? I don’t think Flannery O’Connor was “embarrassed” by any “private” element of her work (despite the recurring spectre of her mother in the domineering characters); she considered the private bits well-hidden and coded by aesthetics. Kathy Acker “embarrassed”… ?
On the other hand, I can see how “embarrassing” it is to let others read The Diary. But who-the-fuck (besides your parents and tabloid readers, if you’re Famous or a Hooker or a Famous Hooker) wants to read it…?
I think 20 years of Reality TV is warping our conception of what is or isn’t Fiction, ironically. Bring back The Imagination in the Reader and Writer both…
When I started to believe whole-heartedly in what I was doing (only about ten years ago, after doing it for 30 years), the “embarrassment” (which, in my opinion, is always a function of knowing, deep down, that it isn’t ready for others to read) evaporated. I also stopped caring, at that point, who did or didn’t like it.
(I meant: after doing it for *20 years*; NOW I’ve been doing it for 30 years)
Which touches on a related, if maybe obvious, point–I think this kind of embarrassment is something younger people feel, not so much those who’ve been around for a while
I’m always bothered when non-writer friends read my work and try to use it to fuck with me. More than a little annoying is the tendency of readers to expect you to remember every line you’ve ever published. After a certain point some types of stories bleed together and you have to ask what the hell they’re talking about. And then they think you’re a bullshitter. And then you have to explain the concept of fiction as a lie which tells the truth. And so on. And so I don’t put it out there. Plus I derive so much of my writing from real life experiences that I wouldn’t want people to start acting differently around me. That’s another reason I never tell a new friend about my writing. It takes them awhile to discover it, sometimes years.
Very good point.
Stephen Augustine: “When I started to believe whole-heartedly in what I was doing (only about ten years ago, after doing it for 30 years), the “embarrassment” (which, in my opinion, is always a function of knowing, deep down, that it isn’t ready for others to read) evaporated. I also stopped caring, at that point, who did or didn’t like it.”
Are you talking about all the comments you leave on other peoples blogs? I mean, do you do anything else?
Why did the burly student make ‘a mistake’ in asking that question?
I realize I’m in the vast minority in thinking so, but I don’t think one’s work has to be personal and reveal uncomfortable things about one in order to be good. For some people, that’s what works, but not for everybody. I would never publish anything that could be embarrassing to me or anyone I love. For me, that’s not what art is about.
Nick, Hemingway was as old as he ever got when he blew out his brains because he was embarassed by his work.
you have to risk more than mere self-exposure, and seek more than mere embarrassment – but you can’t be afraid of those things either – anderson is right though, often they are good guides, especially for younger writers who are generally too afraid of self-exposure to say anything true, or to even see language as a thing beyond the constructor of their social coolness. people should be encouraged to catalog their masturbation sessions to get over those walls and fences, then be encouraged to move on, and seek unvaporous stakes
i do think that no matter how old or wise you are, when you write something that makes you afraid of showing it to others, a little alarm bell should go off in your head alerting you that you might have written something good. might because it’s no guarantee. the only way i have found to tell if something is embarrassing because it is interesting or because it sucks is to let a bunch of time wash over it
it took me years before i worked up the guts to show my poetry to my parents. and then i said, “here. you can read this, but please don’t talk to me about it.”
what causes artists/writers to choose to seek nerve exposure? it has to be something more than simply “the desire to create something interesting.”
EMBARRASSMENT IS GOOD. and good for art? maybe:::: http://loneberry.tumblr.com/post/852551050/the-embarrassing-return-of-the-past-al-burian-goes
Not embarrassed by the “private stuff”… if he really blew his brains out over “embarrassment” (and not an alcohol-induced depression). Embarrassed because he couldn’t write worth a shit anymore.
i really like anderson’s quote about the personal and private elements of our work. it makes me feel a little bit better.
When it comes to being the Age of Overexposure, i try to worry about what others are doing and just focus on myself. i’m not ignorant enough to say “good writing is all the exposure you’ll need,” but i think it really comes down to how comfortable you are being who you are. that’s about all we can do anyway.
Hemingway received shock treatment for depression before his death. We’re not talking about the same thing.
c. 700 pages online (plus about that much text I’m keeping to myself, as yet). A nice little claque of readers, too. Not a vast number but more readers than a lot of paper-published writers I know.
Sampler:
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/even-more-difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/steven-augustines-berlin.pdf
http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/
The other thing I do is compose commercial pop for a living (when I’m not busy raising our 4-year-old). I pay my bills that way (I’m probably the only one on this thread who ever got a royalty check from Chechnya) and pay for the free time to write. What do *you* do, Poot?
Ander Monson discussed this issue, as it relates to technology, in a recent Bookworm interview:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100603david_shields_and_an/#
i have trouble letting members of my family or non-writer friends read my stuff.
i’ve forbidden my mom from reading the suburban swindle. not that there’s anything so terrible in it. it would just be too weird.
“The more you expose of yourself, the more attention you get, and attention is currency. Does that incentive system devalue the personal/private as a creative resource?”
I often wonder when/how Therapy Culture wove its DNA strands in with Writing; I think this deadly (for Fiction) process started sometime in the 1970s with all those Confessional Poem Assignments and cheerfully-Birkenstocked, unisex teachers blabbing on about Self Expression as though it were a Civil Right (and the rainbow-colored key to mental health)…
Writers who “expose themselves” in so-called Fiction are self-medicating with text. All personal experience is Art Fodder but if you regurgitate it in undigested chunks the first thing you’ll notice is how limited (and familiar) the pallet is. To extend that metaphor: when a real writer eats KFC, she shits diamonds and light bulbs. And she isn’t even embarrassed by it.
My family got a hold of a story of mine involving dog rape, oral sex and a giant smoldering manure fire. After my Uncle read the scene where the man refuses to continue performing cunnilingus on his wife because “it tastes like cesspool perch,” he called me and accused me of stealing the line from him!
Okay, so I guess I didn’t realize that the assumption of reservation by the ‘younger’ writer was due to the fact that he was embarassed about content and not quality. It wasn’t specified in his question. He didn’t say why he was embarassed to show his work.
Steven, I don’t think you can completely separate the two things.
I don’t think you can worry too much about “the zeitgeist” or whatever, but I do think different things will be productive/embarrassing over time. Sure, there’s incentive to overshare, but some things people want to hear about and others they don’t. The latter is usually more fertile ground, and people will find it.
Christian Parenti invited me and a pal over to his house for Christmas dinner. This was a decade ago, it was Jewmas, and I didn’t have anything better to do.
He had just finished writing this book on the ‘surveillance state’ and was lecturing the turkey, ham and the rest of us, on the dangers this posed for us. I held up my fork and asked him, “why are you worried about that, when there are going to be cameras on every cell phone within five years?”
Well, it’s been a decade and I never even hear about that book. Instead, it’s reality tv and cult of personality shiterati all the time. We surveil ourselves for aberrations, in the hopes of finding the next taboo.
Shame is there for a reason. Every libertine period is followed by a conservative crack-down. Those at the top now shall be brought low; the low shall stay low of course.
My question is the same as Dan’s. What was the student’s “mistake” in asking that question?
I’ve been calling myself a closet-case. I have consistently stroked poetry clandestinely for sixteen years, but only under three years ago did I actually tell a single soul, having (ahem) won two prizes from an esteemed literary University (despite studying science). It still feels flutterlike to put it to talk, and I think the lack of peers makes it more volatile also, (hence here I am, a blinking somber beacon), and so seeing some of these shrews shred on some of these other threads makes me ponder a retreat to carapace. Please, I’m no hippy (but if you looked at me, you’d laugh), but some of us (I posit: all?) yearn for holding hands. That a high-five is a surrogate, to some, for real intimate “i like you” and embrace — it’s no different from all the humansyncrosies that plague our integer society. I swallow my ire, but still invite you to help tend the dwindling twinkling fire.
An adage I’ve assembled: “getting older is getting over being embarassed”. I find this easier and easier the closer I come to being killed. Still, this is no way to wave to the world; we need love and encouragement. I have a theory about “the sad person in the corner of the party” but this post is already too long, what with you twitterflies and finger-pointing at those who self-aggrandize.
Writers, or other artists, need to work ABOVE the concept of embarrassment. Meaning, they have to embrace it and then steamroll over that shit!
I think my mom and dad are the only people who read my work, and I’m talking about the published stuff.
Years ago, when I first started writing, I used to write stories to show what a “good” person I was– someone with final morals and the right sociopolitical beliefs. Those were the stories I wanted people to see. But of course those stories were dreck. Then, once I started to trust my writerly instincts enough to shed that “good person” persona, I started to write better stories. But even though they were far from “transgressive,” I didn’t want people to see those stories. Yeah, I wanted them published and out there, but I didn’t want to people to comment on the substance of the stories. (Craft issues, of couse, I could handle discussing.) I’d rather not think why I’m writing the things I do. But Anderson’s right: the more personal and true something is (even if its only true in a subterfuged way), the more we risk embarassment.
I don’t think that’s true.
I’ve paraphrased both the student and PTA because this was years ago, but the question and the response had the effect of making the student seem like a dilettante or at least someone lacking the intestinal fortitude to create art and take criticism for the long haul. Certainly you can take issue with my phrasing from a “there are no stupid questions” position, but my recollection of the exchange is that it make the student look pretty naive, and Anderson’s instinctive reaction had a “If you’re serious about what you’re doing, this really shouldn’t be a problem–get over it and create” feel.
Once I finished something I thought my mother would really like, so I sent it to her in draft form. She wouldn’t finish it because she didn’t like it. So I went back to my previous policy–my parents can buy my stuff when it’s published or find it on the internet like anybody else.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a little embarrassed by your work. I think plenty of writers shy away from attention because it is a little humiliating.
One’s ‘art fodder’ is necessarily limited to his personal experience. I was just thinking about this today…. I think a lot of great writers exaggerate certain parts of their personality and then put that warped self in a situation and go from there, introducing that character to other characters which are just people with exaggerated versions of the people that writer knows… etc.
Whether this becomes ‘diamonds and lightbulbs’ or not, it’s all a little embarrassing. But there’s nothing wrong with that.
I mean, part of it is, I guess. But I think there can be a good level of fear of embarrasment–something not embraced. An ulcer of uncertainty. Otherwise artists couldn’t blossom into suicidal geniuses. I’m being crass, but…
“I think a lot of great writers exaggerate certain parts of their personality and then put that warped self in a situation and go from there, introducing that character to other characters which are just people with exaggerated versions of the people that writer knows… etc”
Imagination is (should be) the core reactor of Fiction-making. The exaggeration goes along with mutation, mutilation and transcendence of the Source Material to make Art. Some have made Art from direct transcriptions of their lives, but these are rare cases (Kerouac, as we now know, was Making That Shit Up via Neal Cassady’s stolen experiences)
But I don’t get the “embarrassing” part. Do we honestly think Henry Miller was “embarrassed” about his self-mythologizing? I don’t think Flannery O’Connor was “embarrassed” by any “private” element of her work (despite the recurring spectre of her mother in the domineering characters); she considered the private bits well-hidden and coded by aesthetics. Kathy Acker “embarrassed”… ?
On the other hand, I can see how “embarrassing” it is to let others read The Diary. But who-the-fuck (besides your parents and tabloid readers, if you’re Famous or a Hooker or a Famous Hooker) wants to read it…?
I think 20 years of Reality TV is warping our conception of what is or isn’t Fiction, ironically. Bring back The Imagination in the Reader and Writer both…
When I started to believe whole-heartedly in what I was doing (only about ten years ago, after doing it for 30 years), the “embarrassment” (which, in my opinion, is always a function of knowing, deep down, that it isn’t ready for others to read) evaporated. I also stopped caring, at that point, who did or didn’t like it.
(I meant: after doing it for *20 years*; NOW I’ve been doing it for 30 years)
Which touches on a related, if maybe obvious, point–I think this kind of embarrassment is something younger people feel, not so much those who’ve been around for a while
I’m always bothered when non-writer friends read my work and try to use it to fuck with me. More than a little annoying is the tendency of readers to expect you to remember every line you’ve ever published. After a certain point some types of stories bleed together and you have to ask what the hell they’re talking about. And then they think you’re a bullshitter. And then you have to explain the concept of fiction as a lie which tells the truth. And so on. And so I don’t put it out there. Plus I derive so much of my writing from real life experiences that I wouldn’t want people to start acting differently around me. That’s another reason I never tell a new friend about my writing. It takes them awhile to discover it, sometimes years.
Very good point.
Stephen Augustine: “When I started to believe whole-heartedly in what I was doing (only about ten years ago, after doing it for 30 years), the “embarrassment” (which, in my opinion, is always a function of knowing, deep down, that it isn’t ready for others to read) evaporated. I also stopped caring, at that point, who did or didn’t like it.”
Are you talking about all the comments you leave on other peoples blogs? I mean, do you do anything else?
I realize I’m in the vast minority in thinking so, but I don’t think one’s work has to be personal and reveal uncomfortable things about one in order to be good. For some people, that’s what works, but not for everybody. I would never publish anything that could be embarrassing to me or anyone I love. For me, that’s not what art is about.
Nick, Hemingway was as old as he ever got when he blew out his brains because he was embarassed by his work.
EMBARRASSMENT IS GOOD. and good for art? maybe:::: http://loneberry.tumblr.com/post/852551050/the-embarrassing-return-of-the-past-al-burian-goes
Not embarrassed by the “private stuff”… if he really blew his brains out over “embarrassment” (and not an alcohol-induced depression). Embarrassed because he couldn’t write worth a shit anymore.
Hemingway received shock treatment for depression before his death. We’re not talking about the same thing.
c. 700 pages online (plus about that much text I’m keeping to myself, as yet). A nice little claque of readers, too. Not a vast number but more readers than a lot of paper-published writers I know.
Sampler:
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/even-more-difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/steven-augustines-berlin.pdf
http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/
The other thing I do is compose commercial pop for a living (when I’m not busy raising our 4-year-old). I pay my bills that way (I’m probably the only one on this thread who ever got a royalty check from Chechnya) and pay for the free time to write. What do *you* do, Poot?
Ander Monson discussed this issue, as it relates to technology, in a recent Bookworm interview:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100603david_shields_and_an/#
My family got a hold of a story of mine involving dog rape, oral sex and a giant smoldering manure fire. After my Uncle read the scene where the man refuses to continue performing cunnilingus on his wife because “it tastes like cesspool perch,” he called me and accused me of stealing the line from him!
Okay, so I guess I didn’t realize that the assumption of reservation by the ‘younger’ writer was due to the fact that he was embarassed about content and not quality. It wasn’t specified in his question. He didn’t say why he was embarassed to show his work.
Steven, I don’t think you can completely separate the two things.
I think my mom and dad are the only people who read my work, and I’m talking about the published stuff.
BAC:
I think this is confused now (or I am)… the conversation about “oversharing” vs the one about writerly embarrassment over the quality of the work… which is confused even more when we talk about a literary suicide, which is the kind of suicide we can’t help feeling has to do with writer’s block, or something, when it’s often probably bad chemicals. Also, maybe Hemingway was *always* “embarrassed” about his work… he seemed to think that writing was a “feminine” pursuit he had to live down in a proximity to war, boxing, hunting and bullfights. Post-Hemingway, ironically, a lot of writers do it as a macho thing precisely because of Ernie’s example and being “embarrassed” would feel too “feminine” for them…
I don’t see any value in embarrassment. Same goes for fear. What is there to be embarrassed about or afraid of? If you’re any good at all w/ your creative work, there will always be some people who appreciate and understand it and others who don’t. Que sera…
BAC:
I think this is confused now (or I am)… the conversation about “oversharing” vs the one about writerly embarrassment over the quality of the work… which is confused even more when we talk about a literary suicide, which is the kind of suicide we can’t help feeling has to do with writer’s block, or something, when it’s often probably bad chemicals. Also, maybe Hemingway was *always* “embarrassed” about his work… he seemed to think that writing was a “feminine” pursuit he had to live down in a proximity to war, boxing, hunting and bullfights. Post-Hemingway, ironically, a lot of writers do it as a macho thing precisely because of Ernie’s example and being “embarrassed” would feel too “feminine” for them…
I don’t see any value in embarrassment. Same goes for fear. What is there to be embarrassed about or afraid of? If you’re any good at all w/ your creative work, there will always be some people who appreciate and understand it and others who don’t. Que sera…
Are you embarrassed when someone asks you if you’re a writer or a poet? Do you say “yes”?
it’s easier to accept the butler school of thought and say there’s no such thing as a writer.
That’s just another way to say “no”.
Are you embarrassed when someone asks you if you’re a writer or a poet? Do you say “yes”?
Seriously, man, I feel you. Non-writer friends jump all over any gay character. “How could you write it, dude, without doing research ha ha ha.” That’s one reason why I’m just about friendless.
it’s easier to accept the butler school of thought and say there’s no such thing as a writer.
That’s just another way to say “no”.
Seriously, man, I feel you. Non-writer friends jump all over any gay character. “How could you write it, dude, without doing research ha ha ha.” That’s one reason why I’m just about friendless.