Random
HOW MUCH DO YOU CARE?
just hanging out in here. admire me. or not, i don't care.
How important to you is it to get your writing published? We’re probably all familiar to some degree with the feeling of “flow”, that creative euphoria you experience when immersed in creation, and we’re also probably acquainted with the intense (and rare) sense of personal satisfaction that comes from having created something that resembles (or even exceeds) something we conceptualized before we sat down to create it. And then, of course, there’s that very different experience: the clotted/congested sensation of ushering it into the understandably indifferent world that reacts with form rejections or silence. So do you care? Or to phrase it differently: Would you still write if there were no chance of getting your work published?
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple days, and I’m pretty sure that for me, the answer is yes. But I’m not sure I’d write exactly the same things. (Which is ironic, because it’s not like I’m trying to “appease an audience” or something. What audience? Which means any adjustments I make to something I write are rooted in my own perception of how some imaginary reader out in the world might perceive the book or story, not a reaction to anything actually, you know, real.) If I were writing only for myself, with absolutely no consideration of anyone else ever seeing it, I wouldn’t worry about craft much, if at all. I’d write down my dreams in the morning and focus almost entirely on content, chasing dream interpretations. Part of what I’m saying is that worrying about your readership makes you a better writer, a far more skilled writer.
We sometimes like to think of our favorite writers as “pure” in a certain way… like they’re writing only for themselves, producing some document of their internal landscape which they then toss out the window and the world finds and goes, “Whoa,” and the writer’s like, “Oh yeah, I just coughed that up,” and the world’s like, “It’s so interesting, the inside of your mind.” But I feel instinctive suspicion of a writer who demands that the reader cross the bridge from one end to the other rather than engineering a meeting somewhere in the middle. (I’m not “arguing against” experimental or deliberately challenging writers in a larger sense or something… I don’t want this to be interpreted that way. I’m expressing a very subjective impression.)
Does the color of blood really change from blue to red when it’s exposed to oxygen? Actually, no. The expectation of a readership, even a small one, is an expectation of judgment, and that expectation can inspire self-censorship or an unwillingness to take risks but ideally also refinement of craft/ability/talent. Also, you would never get to see the good shit if your favorite writers didn’t want your love, except for Kafka, and in that case let’s all just appreciate Max Brod’s betrayal.
Photo by Michael Gesinger © 2007
Tags: publication
For the longest time, I couldn’t even write honestly in my journal for fear that it would be read. I wrote all of my personal accounts for myself, but with the fear of an audience. Now, I write for an audience, but take a certain pleasure in writing things that no one will ever see. Sometimes I think About how great it would be to finish a story or a novel–something I was really proud of–and just feed it page by page into the fire.
In short, yes, I would write, even without the possibility of a reader. I think I have to to stay mentally stable.
if you draw everyone into yourself, like whitman, you can have then have the artistic integrity of someone who only writes for themself, but tempered by the formal rigor that comes when your primary consideration is the judgments of others
i wouldn’t write without readers i can’t imagine. i’d smuggle pages in my colon to semi-literate potato farmers if i were in a russian prison camp. well, no, i’d be too scared. but i wouldn’t write either.
Why is writing only for yourself associated with integrity?
I wrote when I wasn’t good enough to get published, and I write things now that I know won’t get published, and I’ve never sent anything to more than a dozen places, so I don’t think publication is my primary goal, but I don’t think I’d write if nothing would ever get published. Or, I don’t think I’d complete stories. I’d start them. I’d start millions of them. But I wouldn’t finish them. Once I got to a tough spot I’d abandoned them and start something else. And I’d probably also write lots of scenes–things not attached to any true bigger project–randomly as they occured to me.
“Part of what I’m saying is that worrying about your readership makes you a better writer, a far more skilled writer.”
Skilled at what? Getting published? Being ‘loved’ by people you don’t know…maybe this less ‘refined’ writing of yours is better. What is publishable is often not what is better. Then comes the inevitable question of publishable where. The internet has a lower ‘prestige’ factor, but…
Not to get all philosophical here, but you will become the writer you are. Full stop.
absolutely would write no matter what.
It ebbs and flows, my caring about seeing my work in print. At times it seems the most important goal in my life; at other times it feels utterly unimportant, an irrelevant participation in a hopeless, pointless activity. And I feel no regret — in fact, I feel hardly anything at all — at not having my work published or distributed to a wider ‘audience.’ (My notion of ‘audience’ is under constant revision. An ‘audience’ might be an abstract source of love — the audience’s love for me, and a reciprocal love that emanates from me bathing all; yet there are times when ‘audience’ is a source only of revulsion, the thing sensed by me as some rotten and indifferent accumulation, a vile mass of eyes and ears that wants nothing more than to consume my private self.) Perhaps the fact that I hold out no hope of every making any money at my writing influences me in this regard: why be concerned about it when in the end nothing will result from whatever large or small efforts I make on its behalf. And the fact that I seem to write — when I write at all — more out of necessity than any rational decision to participate in one special human activity. This isn’t very inspiring, or even very clear, even to myself. Hence, my rather industrious approach, at times; and my great passivity at other times. Why send out my mansucript yet again to another contest that will certainly never win? Then again, someone always wins, and since I’m often amazed by how ordinary the winners’ work is, I’m encouraged once more to throw my own little boat onto the waters. Okay, sure, give it one more try,
champ, one more go.
This is what I was thinking. I have a really hard time with focus and keeping on task. It’s the possibility of some final product being good enough to be publishable that keeps me on a story or poem. Without that ultimate goal, I’d still write, but it would likely be no more than scribbles, napkins, post-its, &c.
A good rejoinder. But most of us aren’t Whitman or Dickinson…
This is my question too
Same for me, ce. I’d spin out a bunch of jagged lines that never came together.
This is something I think about every time I want to make a song or run miles or rearrange the apartment and then sit down to type instead. If I were certain no one would ever read my stuff I would probably be relieved and direct energy into some alternate investment and maybe have some paintings to hang at least. In a way this hope of getting things printed or stuck into the internet is a curse. I mean, think about your visual artist friends. Even the worst of them still have vibrant and crazy images in their apartments.
i think of writing for an audience as a form of form. my writing is much shittier in the absence of this constraint. it gets self-indulgent, half-wrought, solipsistic, apolitical, dutiless. it reinforces the weak modes of thinking i feel safest in no matter how accountable i try to hold myself.
writing well in the absence of an an audience requires a very specific kind of schizophrenia that i lack: the ability to write as self, then read as other.
i love this question
probably because it’s almost impossible to make art that reaches a good-sized audience without the art getting commodified in the process
A good question, thoughtfully put.
Yes, I think I would write. I think my answer is largely the same as yours, Nick–yes, but differently. I think about (admire/covet/purchase) clothing and cosmetics a lot. And I wear it, often elaborately, even if it’s just me at home or in the car or somewhere else otherwise unpopulated. It might change a bit if I know I’m going to see people. But I am the audience that I consciously/constantly reckon with, before giving any thought to the potentially larger, unseen one.
When I am fervently at work on something, I don’t think about publication. It’s in the aftermath, when I’m reading it over, wanting to put it somewhere before moving on, that I consider sending it out. Submitting and publishing are akin to housekeeping.
To me, writing is about communication. That’s why we have language, both spoken and written. So I guess if no one was reading, or would ever read, it would all feel rather futile.
Michael,
Two things.
1. Art, by definition, assumes an audience, even if that audience is not immediate. If one never shows one’s writing to anyone, there is still a future or eventual audience when one dies and one’s manuscripts are discovered. If one avoids this by constantly destroying all one’s writing immediately after one writes it, one doesn’t have art – one has ashes. That future audience weighs on the writing just as much as an immediate audience does, perhaps even more than an immediate audience.
(This is, of course, avoiding the issue of belief in the existence of G-d, which changes the question of ‘audience’ entirely.)
2. Everything is commodified. I think authenticity is a false grail and not worth pursuing. All activity reproduces capitalism, and everything we do and are is contaminated by value, commodity, ideology, and etcetera. There is no pure space or action. This applies to hermits who don’t show their writing to anyone… because even if they escaped to the woods somewhere and never contact anyone at all, they still carried this society into the woods with them.
Small art is a commodity just like big art. Obscurity or lack of popularity are matters of quantity, not quality.
I think the more telling question is not ‘would you write’ but ‘would you edit and revise’? What you make that fifth revision and spend time with your usage dictionary if there was no audience?
I wonder if nonfiction works the same way? I wrote something recently that I will probably never try to publish. It’s about a friend who died and it’s very intimate and probably not something that, say, his family members would want to stumble across. It also feels incredibly honest to me. If I’d written it with the intention of sharing, I think it would have looked very different. This might be wrong-headed, and maybe some day I’ll change my mind. But writing this piece for only myself worked as…I guess, the opposite of a constraint? Or maybe a constraint in the sense that I made it as emotionally and factually honest as possible, something I might have gamed or lightened if I had an eye towards putting it out in the world.
Aren’t we always writing for ourselves during the process of writing? It’s only after a piece is written that readers become involved. One never knows what he or she is working is going to be published (or for that matter finished) during the initial writing–that’s the magical fun of the initial act, and the only reason I’m fairly confident I’d write even if there were no publication outlet.
oh and yes, probably all nonfiction should be as emotionally and factually honest as possible, but is it? When we are thinking of an audience, I think there are always barriers to that, both conscious and subconscious.
Excellent point. Speaking only for myself my answer would be similar to my answer in the post: I would edit and revise, but I would edit and revise a little differently.
I think I operate under some sort of necessary self-delusion during the initial process… while I’m writing something that’s particularly pleasing (or germane) only to me, I have a vague perception of “A reader will love this!” I understand on a conscious level that this is just something I have to do while writing so the editorial/self-conscious parts of my brain don’t disrupt the “flow.” Later I may go back and think, “No one but me could possibly like this.”
I have the inverse sometimes, too, wherein a reader (when it gets to that point) will say they particularly liked some aspect of this or that, and upon looking at what they’re indicating I don’t like it all anymore.
I suppose that’s one of the best functions of readers–they keep your work new. I can’t go back to things I wrote three years ago. But a reader can come to it and it’s new.
Writing is about communication, yes, but it is also about recording, making a record of something from a certain perspective. When I write things it is not usually to communicate something to others but rather to record my experience, my perspective, and to know that that record is ‘somewhere’ in ‘my words’.
Another thing: most poetry – especially poetry written in journals and diaries between the ages of 13 and 20 – has no audience, even when it is presented publicly.
For the longest time, I couldn’t even write honestly in my journal for fear that it would be read. I wrote all of my personal accounts for myself, but with the fear of an audience. Now, I write for an audience, but take a certain pleasure in writing things that no one will ever see. Sometimes I think About how great it would be to finish a story or a novel–something I was really proud of–and just feed it page by page into the fire.
In short, yes, I would write, even without the possibility of a reader. I think I have to to stay mentally stable.
As others have said, I wrote when I couldn’t hope to get a story accepted anywhere. I enjoy writing whether or not others enjoy what I write. I also care about being published. I care very much. I don’t think I consider audience when I’m writing because I am not an analytical writer. I feel like writing a story, I sit down, write, finish and move on. I primarily think about audience when I think about where to send a story.
if you draw everyone into yourself, like whitman, you can have then have the artistic integrity of someone who only writes for themself, but tempered by the formal rigor that comes when your primary consideration is the judgments of others
I care after. Never during.
i wouldn’t write without readers i can’t imagine. i’d smuggle pages in my colon to semi-literate potato farmers if i were in a russian prison camp. well, no, i’d be too scared. but i wouldn’t write either.
Why is writing only for yourself associated with integrity?
I wrote when I wasn’t good enough to get published, and I write things now that I know won’t get published, and I’ve never sent anything to more than a dozen places, so I don’t think publication is my primary goal, but I don’t think I’d write if nothing would ever get published. Or, I don’t think I’d complete stories. I’d start them. I’d start millions of them. But I wouldn’t finish them. Once I got to a tough spot I’d abandoned them and start something else. And I’d probably also write lots of scenes–things not attached to any true bigger project–randomly as they occured to me.
“Part of what I’m saying is that worrying about your readership makes you a better writer, a far more skilled writer.”
Skilled at what? Getting published? Being ‘loved’ by people you don’t know…maybe this less ‘refined’ writing of yours is better. What is publishable is often not what is better. Then comes the inevitable question of publishable where. The internet has a lower ‘prestige’ factor, but…
Not to get all philosophical here, but you will become the writer you are. Full stop.
absolutely would write no matter what.
This is what I was thinking. I have a really hard time with focus and keeping on task. It’s the possibility of some final product being good enough to be publishable that keeps me on a story or poem. Without that ultimate goal, I’d still write, but it would likely be no more than scribbles, napkins, post-its, &c.
I would still write, but not necessarily all the same things. A good bit of what I have written has been for other people, not myself.
i dont care much today.
A good rejoinder. But most of us aren’t Whitman or Dickinson…
This is my question too
Same for me, ce. I’d spin out a bunch of jagged lines that never came together.
This is something I think about every time I want to make a song or run miles or rearrange the apartment and then sit down to type instead. If I were certain no one would ever read my stuff I would probably be relieved and direct energy into some alternate investment and maybe have some paintings to hang at least. In a way this hope of getting things printed or stuck into the internet is a curse. I mean, think about your visual artist friends. Even the worst of them still have vibrant and crazy images in their apartments.
i think of writing for an audience as a form of form. my writing is much shittier in the absence of this constraint. it gets self-indulgent, half-wrought, solipsistic, apolitical, dutiless. it reinforces the weak modes of thinking i feel safest in no matter how accountable i try to hold myself.
writing well in the absence of an an audience requires a very specific kind of schizophrenia that i lack: the ability to write as self, then read as other.
i love this question
probably because it’s almost impossible to make art that reaches a good-sized audience without the art getting commodified in the process
If there were no chance to become a journeyman barker in a carnivale?
I might still write. With butcher paper and crayola, spread upon a vanity.
I’m a pretty egotistical narcissisistic bastard, however.
Stubborn as all git.
I want that flipping carny job, man.
* Foreskin Ringling *
A good question, thoughtfully put.
Yes, I think I would write. I think my answer is largely the same as yours, Nick–yes, but differently. I think about (admire/covet/purchase) clothing and cosmetics a lot. And I wear it, often elaborately, even if it’s just me at home or in the car or somewhere else otherwise unpopulated. It might change a bit if I know I’m going to see people. But I am the audience that I consciously/constantly reckon with, before giving any thought to the potentially larger, unseen one.
When I am fervently at work on something, I don’t think about publication. It’s in the aftermath, when I’m reading it over, wanting to put it somewhere before moving on, that I consider sending it out. Submitting and publishing are akin to housekeeping.
To me, writing is about communication. That’s why we have language, both spoken and written. So I guess if no one was reading, or would ever read, it would all feel rather futile.
i write for the women and the money and the power.
Michael,
Two things.
1. Art, by definition, assumes an audience, even if that audience is not immediate. If one never shows one’s writing to anyone, there is still a future or eventual audience when one dies and one’s manuscripts are discovered. If one avoids this by constantly destroying all one’s writing immediately after one writes it, one doesn’t have art – one has ashes. That future audience weighs on the writing just as much as an immediate audience does, perhaps even more than an immediate audience.
(This is, of course, avoiding the issue of belief in the existence of G-d, which changes the question of ‘audience’ entirely.)
2. Everything is commodified. I think authenticity is a false grail and not worth pursuing. All activity reproduces capitalism, and everything we do and are is contaminated by value, commodity, ideology, and etcetera. There is no pure space or action. This applies to hermits who don’t show their writing to anyone… because even if they escaped to the woods somewhere and never contact anyone at all, they still carried this society into the woods with them.
Small art is a commodity just like big art. Obscurity or lack of popularity are matters of quantity, not quality.
I think the more telling question is not ‘would you write’ but ‘would you edit and revise’? What you make that fifth revision and spend time with your usage dictionary if there was no audience?
I wonder if nonfiction works the same way? I wrote something recently that I will probably never try to publish. It’s about a friend who died and it’s very intimate and probably not something that, say, his family members would want to stumble across. It also feels incredibly honest to me. If I’d written it with the intention of sharing, I think it would have looked very different. This might be wrong-headed, and maybe some day I’ll change my mind. But writing this piece for only myself worked as…I guess, the opposite of a constraint? Or maybe a constraint in the sense that I made it as emotionally and factually honest as possible, something I might have gamed or lightened if I had an eye towards putting it out in the world.
Aren’t we always writing for ourselves during the process of writing? It’s only after a piece is written that readers become involved. One never knows what he or she is working is going to be published (or for that matter finished) during the initial writing–that’s the magical fun of the initial act, and the only reason I’m fairly confident I’d write even if there were no publication outlet.
oh and yes, probably all nonfiction should be as emotionally and factually honest as possible, but is it? When we are thinking of an audience, I think there are always barriers to that, both conscious and subconscious.
Excellent point. Speaking only for myself my answer would be similar to my answer in the post: I would edit and revise, but I would edit and revise a little differently.
I think I operate under some sort of necessary self-delusion during the initial process… while I’m writing something that’s particularly pleasing (or germane) only to me, I have a vague perception of “A reader will love this!” I understand on a conscious level that this is just something I have to do while writing so the editorial/self-conscious parts of my brain don’t disrupt the “flow.” Later I may go back and think, “No one but me could possibly like this.”
Not published in my lifetime, or never published?
If never, no, I wouldn’t write. If I create art, I want it to be able to reach people, to be experienced by and to impact upon them (as they, in a more conceptual sense, impact upon it in turn).
I would just focus on another artform. You know? So good ideas won’t be suited to the transition from one medium to another. That’s a compromise, an abandonment, of one idea, not of any wider artistic integrity, or self.
I remember reading an interview with some big comedian who talked about the habit of keeping a notebook of joke ideas, and the heartbroken anxiety induced in some would-be funnymen by the loss of such a book. If you’re any good, he said, you won’t have any trouble coming up with another notebook’s worth of jokes.
There are always ideas. But an idea that stays an idea and nothing more is worthless, and one which becomes more than itself in the world / consciousness of just one person isn’t much better.
I guess there’s the old thing of when is a pile not a pile. I don’t know where the boundary goes, but, at least for me, ‘unpublished’ is definitely on the ‘less desirable’ side of things.
I would probably still fiddle with a poem every couple of months or something, actually. For giggles.
I have the inverse sometimes, too, wherein a reader (when it gets to that point) will say they particularly liked some aspect of this or that, and upon looking at what they’re indicating I don’t like it all anymore.
I suppose that’s one of the best functions of readers–they keep your work new. I can’t go back to things I wrote three years ago. But a reader can come to it and it’s new.
Writing is about communication, yes, but it is also about recording, making a record of something from a certain perspective. When I write things it is not usually to communicate something to others but rather to record my experience, my perspective, and to know that that record is ‘somewhere’ in ‘my words’.
Another thing: most poetry – especially poetry written in journals and diaries between the ages of 13 and 20 – has no audience, even when it is presented publicly.
Maybe we should focus occasionally on getting things printed really big, then hanging them around our apartments. This could become a thing.
As others have said, I wrote when I couldn’t hope to get a story accepted anywhere. I enjoy writing whether or not others enjoy what I write. I also care about being published. I care very much. I don’t think I consider audience when I’m writing because I am not an analytical writer. I feel like writing a story, I sit down, write, finish and move on. I primarily think about audience when I think about where to send a story.
Doesn’t everyone write for hugs and punches?
I care after. Never during.
I would still write, but not necessarily all the same things. A good bit of what I have written has been for other people, not myself.
i dont care much today.
I am a longtime lurker, who probably won’t say anything here again anytime soon. But I like this question very much, and felt that I needed to respond, as it’s an issue I struggle with a lot.
When I first started writing (flash, short fiction), I don’t think I even had any concept of what publishing a piece might be like; this was in the days before the proliferation of web ‘zines, mind you, before I knew anyone in the writing world. Some years later, when I began to take my writing “seriously” — to the extent possible, anyway — I started thinking more about the idea of getting my work out into the world somehow. The idea obsessed me for a time, both before and during the period in which my fiction was slowly starting to find homes, however modest. These days publication obsesses me less and less, reading and creating more and more, though I do frequently question the value of writing solely for myself. I don’t submit nearly as often or as widely as I ought to at this stage in the game (what game? who’s on first?); I do of course care about publication and audience, but I try not to let the thought of it consume me daily. It’s a difficult, delicate balance.
In any case, there were definitely times when I wrote — and still write — pieces I don’t imagine will ever find homes at all, either because of their length, their content, their form, or some other combination of ugly red marks (welts?) I expect will be applied to them. And that’s cool, so long as I believe that such work is “good work.” But here’s an exception to what I’ve said above: a quirky piece I wrote back in 2006 while living in another country will be published in a new online ‘zine in a few days (August 1st). It took four years to stumble upon a place for which the work seemed a likely “fit,” a ‘zine that, until now, hadn’t even existed. I’d never expected to publish the story, which is about 4,000 words, and I don’t expect that many people will read (or finish reading) it on their computer screens or iPads or whatever. But I’m thrilled, nonetheless, that an editor found it worth publishing, as it’s an interesting, if flawed, piece. I think there’s some satisfaction in this fact alone, regardless of how many people ever read or “like” it.
In any case, I think there’s a lot to be said for “process,” even when publication and/or substantial audience seems a distant possibility. I actually have multiple unpublished novella-length manuscripts (and short stories) on my hard drive, and one somewhat messy novel…and that’s fine. I may eventually find homes for some or all of them, or I may not. In any case, I wrote those works. Even if, like Kakfa, I decide to abandon certain of them before I die (I don’t have a friend or admirer like Brod to save my all-too-humble oeuvre from the fire), they were written by my hand(s), they exist(ed), and I don’t regret any of it.
Thanks, Nick, for this post.
~m
If there were no chance to become a journeyman barker in a carnivale?
I might still write. With butcher paper and crayola, spread upon a vanity.
I’m a pretty egotistical narcissisistic bastard, however.
Stubborn as all git.
I want that flipping carny job, man.
* Foreskin Ringling *
i write for the women and the money and the power.
And thanks for your comment, a very thorough and thoughtful one. Curious to read your story, send a link via email when it goes up if so inclined.
Not published in my lifetime, or never published?
If never, no, I wouldn’t write. If I create art, I want it to be able to reach people, to be experienced by and to impact upon them (as they, in a more conceptual sense, impact upon it in turn).
I would just focus on another artform. You know? So good ideas won’t be suited to the transition from one medium to another. That’s a compromise, an abandonment, of one idea, not of any wider artistic integrity, or self.
I remember reading an interview with some big comedian who talked about the habit of keeping a notebook of joke ideas, and the heartbroken anxiety induced in some would-be funnymen by the loss of such a book. If you’re any good, he said, you won’t have any trouble coming up with another notebook’s worth of jokes.
There are always ideas. But an idea that stays an idea and nothing more is worthless, and one which becomes more than itself in the world / consciousness of just one person isn’t much better.
I guess there’s the old thing of when is a pile not a pile. I don’t know where the boundary goes, but, at least for me, ‘unpublished’ is definitely on the ‘less desirable’ side of things.
I would probably still fiddle with a poem every couple of months or something, actually. For giggles.
Maybe we should focus occasionally on getting things printed really big, then hanging them around our apartments. This could become a thing.
I agree about the selfish nature of writing. Someone mentioned below that poetry between 13 – 20 (?) is inaccessible. I agree but carry this notion further into the constant morphs of “adulthood” (phases). Most of my writing is initially caught in some vague purgatory for the reader- whereas I see it almost as a photograph. I revise and I “photoshop” to get the color levels right (word adjustments and enjambment) so that maybe someone will see the ghost in the background, etc. This is usually after criticism from someone who I want to get what I am trying to convey.
I would still write with no chance of getting published, though I must admit that blogging has been an almost anonymous source of relief. (At least in the past)
Doesn’t everyone write for hugs and punches?
I am a longtime lurker, who probably won’t say anything here again anytime soon. But I like this question very much, and felt that I needed to respond, as it’s an issue I struggle with a lot.
When I first started writing (flash, short fiction), I don’t think I even had any concept of what publishing a piece might be like; this was in the days before the proliferation of web ‘zines, mind you, before I knew anyone in the writing world. Some years later, when I began to take my writing “seriously” — to the extent possible, anyway — I started thinking more about the idea of getting my work out into the world somehow. The idea obsessed me for a time, both before and during the period in which my fiction was slowly starting to find homes, however modest. These days publication obsesses me less and less, reading and creating more and more, though I do frequently question the value of writing solely for myself. I don’t submit nearly as often or as widely as I ought to at this stage in the game (what game? who’s on first?); I do of course care about publication and audience, but I try not to let the thought of it consume me daily. It’s a difficult, delicate balance.
In any case, there were definitely times when I wrote — and still write — pieces I don’t imagine will ever find homes at all, either because of their length, their content, their form, or some other combination of ugly red marks (welts?) I expect will be applied to them. And that’s cool, so long as I believe that such work is “good work.” But here’s an exception to what I’ve said above: a quirky piece I wrote back in 2006 while living in another country will be published in a new online ‘zine in a few days (August 1st). It took four years to stumble upon a place for which the work seemed a likely “fit,” a ‘zine that, until now, hadn’t even existed. I’d never expected to publish the story, which is about 4,000 words, and I don’t expect that many people will read (or finish reading) it on their computer screens or iPads or whatever. But I’m thrilled, nonetheless, that an editor found it worth publishing, as it’s an interesting, if flawed, piece. I think there’s some satisfaction in this fact alone, regardless of how many people ever read or “like” it.
In any case, I think there’s a lot to be said for “process,” even when publication and/or substantial audience seems a distant possibility. I actually have multiple unpublished novella-length manuscripts (and short stories) on my hard drive, and one somewhat messy novel…and that’s fine. I may eventually find homes for some or all of them, or I may not. In any case, I wrote those works. Even if, like Kakfa, I decide to abandon certain of them before I die (I don’t have a friend or admirer like Brod to save my all-too-humble oeuvre from the fire), they were written by my hand(s), they exist(ed), and I don’t regret any of it.
Thanks, Nick, for this post.
~m
And thanks for your comment, a very thorough and thoughtful one. Curious to read your story, send a link via email when it goes up if so inclined.
I agree about the selfish nature of writing. Someone mentioned below that poetry between 13 – 20 (?) is inaccessible. I agree but carry this notion further into the constant morphs of “adulthood” (phases). Most of my writing is initially caught in some vague purgatory for the reader- whereas I see it almost as a photograph. I revise and I “photoshop” to get the color levels right (word adjustments and enjambment) so that maybe someone will see the ghost in the background, etc. This is usually after criticism from someone who I want to get what I am trying to convey.
I would still write with no chance of getting published, though I must admit that blogging has been an almost anonymous source of relief. (At least in the past)
I am very serious about this topic. Actually, deeply tormented. From the third grade on I wrote partly for the praise of my classmates and teachers and partly for my own enjoyment. I wrote from third grade on with the goal of becoming a very good writer and a professional writer. For several years after my MFA I wrote to get published, to catch my “break.” I wrote what I thought would get me noticed. Those were also the years I liked writing the least. Because my purpose in writing was publishing and making a splash every story was a failure. Because I dislike most of what I believed sells I disliked everything I wrote. Every sentence was mixed up with anticipation of how it was going to be recieved. I was only like this after my MFA, I think, because this was the first time in my life I didn’t have some sort of captive audience–workshops, teachers, girls I was trying to impress–whose praise satisfied me. I remember late in ’08 I thought to myself “maybe I won’t actually be a writer” because I went through one of those much needed periods–two years–of only rejection letters. Around this time I started reading Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson and the integrity of those two giants gave me some courage–to write what they wanted to, and if it was published or widely read, terrific, and if not, to hell with them–and only then did I start enjoying writing again. Now, I write for my own enjoyment and my own critical reception. I work harder than I ever did in the editing. I work without thought of publication and when I do worry about publication or take it seriously I stop submitting stories. This is the only way, for me, because I have a weak personality, to write for the purity of the expression. It would be nice to know someone read a story and liked it, but it no longer matters to me, or so I tell myself.
I am very serious about this topic. Actually, deeply tormented. From the third grade on I wrote partly for the praise of my classmates and teachers and partly for my own enjoyment. I wrote from third grade on with the goal of becoming a very good writer and a professional writer. For several years after my MFA I wrote to get published, to catch my “break.” I wrote what I thought would get me noticed. Those were also the years I liked writing the least. Because my purpose in writing was publishing and making a splash every story was a failure. Because I dislike most of what I believed sells I disliked everything I wrote. Every sentence was mixed up with anticipation of how it was going to be recieved. I was only like this after my MFA, I think, because this was the first time in my life I didn’t have some sort of captive audience–workshops, teachers, girls I was trying to impress–whose praise satisfied me. I remember late in ’08 I thought to myself “maybe I won’t actually be a writer” because I went through one of those much needed periods–two years–of only rejection letters. Around this time I started reading Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson and the integrity of those two giants gave me some courage–to write what they wanted to, and if it was published or widely read, terrific, and if not, to hell with them–and only then did I start enjoying writing again. Now, I write for my own enjoyment and my own critical reception. I work harder than I ever did in the editing. I work without thought of publication and when I do worry about publication or take it seriously I stop submitting stories. This is the only way, for me, because I have a weak personality, to write for the purity of the expression. It would be nice to know someone read a story and liked it, but it no longer matters to me, or so I tell myself.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.