What CAN we write?

[dark desire]

A friend once said -

I think one of the hard things is finding what one CAN write about. That's our strength, what we can write about. But it's hard to find our strengths, easy to find our weaknesses. I think we like to keep our strengths covered up, otherwise they accuse us of being unused. Because it's one thing to know our strengths, but it takes real courage to use them.

Without contesting what has been said, can we look into what we CAN write?

I shall give my answer after a few replies.

[BienvenuJDC]

My greatest strength....my imagination of thinking of things that no one else thinks of...

IMAGINE

[JBI]

The big question should be what do people want to read. The Romantic myth of writing as a personal exercise ignores the reality that art has an implied artist most of the time. Programmed without that tradition, literature loses its appeal.

Once you realize literature becomes a performance, it begins to make sense. The American confessional tradition that took over during and after the Beat generation basically cut itself off from community outside itself.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Just an aside first. I have not seen that little gem from dear old Oscar before, brilliant:


“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

It's incredible, I'm sure he keeps on writing even after his death!

Anyway, should be question not be about how something is written as opposed to what? Other than that I don't really understand the question sorry.

[Dark Muse]

The stuff of nightmares.

Explorations into the dark psyche is the area of which I am most comfortable, the morbid and the macabre. One of the things of which I enjoy doing the most is altering ones perception of something.

[Charles Darnay]

About the world around you, about the world inside you, about the world that does not exist - anything except vampires.....don't.

I think JBI's post is very poignant, at least if your aim in writing is to write to be published. There are those who write purely for themselves and in that case, screw what the rest of the world wants. But yes, if you are writing in order to share your work (as most do) then consider what it is the world wants....except vampires.

[Dark Muse]

But yes, if you are writing in order to share your work (as most do) then consider what it is the world wants....except vampires.

Don't blame the vampires just because certain individuals have besmirched their reputation and misrepresented them.

[Charles Darnay]

I had a feeling you'd come at me for that.

True, vampires are not to blame for the onslaught of terrible vampire lit, but I think we need to let them rest for a while.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I had a feeling you'd come at me for that.

True, vampires are not to blame for the onslaught of terrible vampire lit, but I think we need to let them rest for a while.

Ha, ha was that an intentional joke?

[Paulclem]

JBI's right - if you want to write for a career. The odd writer will create a market with an idea that is either original or which taps into some trend. But it's mainly about what people want to read. If you wanted to write sci fi, then look at what sells. if it's children's literature, then look at what is on the shelves for the various age groups. It's no mystery - if you want to be able to write and sustain your writing, you have to make money to continue. Once you get into a different career, then it's very difficult.

By the way - a good vampire book is Fevre Dream by George RR Martin.

[LitNetIsGreat]

JBI's right - if you want to write for a career. The odd writer will create a market with an idea that is either original or which taps into some trend. But it's mainly about what people want to read. If you wanted to write sci fi, then look at what sells. if it's children's literature, then look at what is on the shelves for the various age groups. It's no mystery - if you want to be able to write and sustain your writing, you have to make money to continue. Once you get into a different career, then it's very difficult.

By the way - a good vampire book is Fevre Dream by George RR Martin.

A good idea only I read that to follow what is in fashion in the publishing world means that you are already one step behind, as by the time you have written it it is then out of fashion. Anyway, there is virtually zero chance of getting published and making any money out of writing, certainly for the unpublished writer, so there is little point in considering such things outside of pure speculation. I also wonder if the OP was just taking in general about things to write about, not necessarily writing to publish, I don't know?

[JBI]

JBI's right - if you want to write for a career. The odd writer will create a market with an idea that is either original or which taps into some trend. But it's mainly about what people want to read. If you wanted to write sci fi, then look at what sells. if it's children's literature, then look at what is on the shelves for the various age groups. It's no mystery - if you want to be able to write and sustain your writing, you have to make money to continue. Once you get into a different career, then it's very difficult.

By the way - a good vampire book is Fevre Dream by George RR Martin.

Not only to sell. To be read. Some authors and artists create only for themselves. Therefore they can be dismissed. Even authors who do not want money but merely want recognition must realize art is not an onanistic behavior.

[Calidore]

JBI's right - if you want to write for a career. The odd writer will create a market with an idea that is either original or which taps into some trend. But it's mainly about what people want to read. If you wanted to write sci fi, then look at what sells. if it's children's literature, then look at what is on the shelves for the various age groups. It's no mystery - if you want to be able to write and sustain your writing, you have to make money to continue. Once you get into a different career, then it's very difficult.

By the way - a good vampire book is Fevre Dream by George RR Martin.

I'm partial to Brian Lumley's Wamphyri from his Necroscope series. They're huge, powerful, violent, and totally evil. On their homeworld, they live in aeries on huge cliffs and have a society of sorts, with self-serving alliances and rivalries. In their homes, each is served by vampire lieutenants, human slaves, and assorted creatures, grown from vampire flesh in vats, that serve more specific purposes (flying steeds, war beasts, etc.) Needless to say, this is about as far from Twilight as you can get.

As too many authors do, Lumley beat his good ideas into the ground with too many books, but the initial five-book Necroscope series and the initial follow-up Vampire World trilogy are some of the highest quality modern pulp you'll find.

[paradoxical]

I want to read something that sheds light on the human experience. That's what is important to me and, in my opinion, the only thing really worth writing about.

One problem that I struggle with is just how much of my life to share. There are many things I don't want to write about but I was taught to "write what I know" and I believe this is the correct approach. Otherwise, the writing seems false.


The big question should be what do people want to read. The Romantic myth of writing as a personal exercise ignores the reality that art has an implied artist most of the time. Programmed without that tradition, literature loses its appeal.

Once you realize literature becomes a performance, it begins to make sense. The American confessional tradition that took over during and after the Beat generation basically cut itself off from community outside itself.

JBI, I agree that the real question is what people want to read. I'm also intrigued by the rest of your statement and still trying to understand what you meant. Do you mean a performance or implied artist in the sense of something like Oedipus or the oral tradition of poetry?

I also don't understand what you meant by the confessional tradition used by the Beats. How did they cut themselves off from the community outside themselves? Surely works such as On The Road have had a major impact on modern literature. And where would we be without writers such as Henry Miller, William S Burroughs, or even Bukowski?

It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing a modern reader wants to read. Of course literature has changed. Hardly anyone wants to read Chaucer or even Milton or John Donne, etc. anymore. I still enjoy reading 19th century novels but personally, the only poetry I can stand to read is modern poetry. Sure, I studied the classics in school but I feel that literature evolves just as painting has evolved and changed.

I'm sure there was a major reaction to and harsh criticism of movements such as the Impressionists, Post-Impressionism, the Postmodern movement, etc. Surely you are not saying that we must stick to the classics? Just trying to understand what you meant.

[ShadowsCool]

If you got an imagination you can write about anything. Provided your vocabulary is up to par. Any and all learning of the world around means squat without a good sense of anything is possible.

[Delta40]

I think the stuff I write is crap. It's in there waiting to come out but making sense of it? Well that's a whole different ballgame....

[Desolation]

I mostly agree with JBI, but not entirely. I do think that writers should write for themselves, but they should still try to create something that people would actually be interested in if they want to be read.

The best advice I've ever heard, and I don't remember the source, is to "Write the book that you want to read." I guess that's all you really can do, though.

It's important to keep audience in mind, but pandering is always a bad idea...And you can never really know what anyone wants to read. There's an audience for everything - every weird, mundane, twisted, or otherwise thing that you could possibly imagine.

[ShadowsCool]

I think the stuff I write is crap. It's in there waiting to come out but making sense of it? Well that's a whole different ballgame....

Crap? Um, I disagree. Of course that's for you to decide. I am the reader of your poetics and you are the dispenser. It matters only that the reader gets joy from one's works and not the writer. For all artists tend to doubt their own genius.

[Silas Thorne]

It matters only that the reader gets joy from one's works and not the writer.

:yikes: Maybe for technical writers, or people who write to order, perhaps.

I think Delta enjoys writing, or she wouldn't be. She's just being humble here.

[Silas Thorne]

Otherwise, I'd tend to agree with Desolation. Being aware of your audience and pandering to it are quite different.

[Delta40]

:yikes: Maybe for technical writers, or people who write to order, perhaps.

I think Delta enjoys writing, or she wouldn't be. She's just being humble here.

It's not about being humble. Writing is always a struggle. I don't mean to devalue my own work on Lit-Net but there is always something to dig and mine for, something that is more comprehensible and not just in poetry form. Short stories, plays, and books. They are not forthcoming. I'm surrounded by material in countless journals, research and inspiration coupled with what is inside of me. How on earth do I reconcile all of this into what I know to be something greater than what I have already created?

[ShadowsCool]

Inspiration. You gotta feel it and get excited by it. If not then what you write feels stale. Just try to be inspired and forget about the great ideas, they will come.

[shortstoryfan]

JBI makes a good point, as usual.

My own writing is kind of odd, because of the influences I've let take hold of me--which I guess is the poetry of the avant-garde. I would say it's not very precise work, what I do, but much more about...effect? I've always kept in mind that there is probably an audience for this kind of work, though it's probably much smaller and removed from the reading of the general public.

[Delta40]

I guess being the authentic you must always count. When we speak of influences, I have to be mindful that often it is mere fashion that comes and goes. I'm moved by different authors and poets but I'm not conscious of what those influences might be. So I read Shakespeare and Gwen Harwood. What traces do they leave when I write? I really couldn't say.

[shortstoryfan]

Authenticity defames me.

[Delta40]

Authenticity defames me.

In what way?

[kelby_lake]

I still enjoy reading 19th century novels but personally, the only poetry I can stand to read is modern poetry.

That's really strange. I'm terrible with modern poetry- can only make it past the nineteen-thirties. The older poetry is reassuringly more conventionally poetic.

Try Swinburne- he's fun :)

[kelby_lake]

As for what I can write, I think it would be presumptious of me to say I can write about something as if I was the fountain of knowledge on it.

I used to be able to write poetry, with varying success, but I feel my poetic soul has dried up :)

[cacian]

write about what others never write about.
writing is about letting one's imagination run where it had never ran before.
it is pushing one's self to places where no one else has been before.
writing is like an exploration of ideas that only you can find and put together in the way that others could not.
the ideal writer for me is when one is able to tell a book from its content not cover and being able to recongnise the writer without them revealing themselves.
That for is a true achievement of literay success.
One can tell straight away who something is by without having them to reveal themselves.

[dark desire]

Declan was right. A lot of people here are hiding what they can write behind intellectualizing the process of writing and preaching about it. I just knocked the door of the sub-conscious and the unconscious and I ended up facing a lot of defense.

Someone said in an earlier post that an intellectual question about writing will be better than my question. And then there was no dearth of people admiring him that yes 'that' is the question one should address. Why? As Declan put it wisely - it takes a lot of courage to go there. Two or three people did go to that deeper turf. One who succeeded the most was Delta40. I am a little annoyed with people's defenses in such a safe place.

I can write about myself, my strange life. When I write there is a lot of I and my and sometimes I alienate and write he, but I always write about myself. Even on posts here I talk more about me and less about other stuff. I have tried very hard for people around to understand me, my troubles but they were never interested. So I also buried things within me and kept moving. And I walked and walked putting everything inside me into graves for four years.

I want to reclaim what I have lost. I want to know if there is something to reclaim. To me all of it looks like a redundant struggle and yet my mind never comes out of it. Can language help me out? I want to know. That is why I write. For me what I can write is an exploration of what I want to write. So for me the two questions are not really different.

I do want my writing to be a publishing success but I am finding commercial success and concerns with commercial success very redundant. Great writers were often not publishing successes in their own times - Wilde, Kierkegaard, Lawrence, Jean Rhys and innumerable others while almost all the best selling authors fill me up with disgust. If the process of writing has to be devoted to worldly ideas of success and economics then I refuse to see value in such writings.

Writing is a process that I want to enjoy. The deeper territories are unavailable to me. Mostly I write in a fit of angry passion. Somehow I am not in touch with the pain inside and that pains me a lot. I am a horrible person. It is a horror to be like me. The irony is that the horror does not come out in my writing, it is always restricted to my being, my frustration.

I put this thread up to celebrate the success we have achieved in our solitary endeavours. But it looks like people are not willing to share it. I shared my struggle. I will not share my success just like others. It would have been lovely to see people pat their own backs. Torturing oneself for improvement while not acknowledging the bounties that they have achieved is a painful enigma that most artists share. Does it help in their art? I doubt that.

[dark desire]

As for what I can write, I think it would be presumptious of me to say I can write about something as if I was the fountain of knowledge on it.

I used to be able to write poetry, with varying success, but I feel my poetic soul has dried up :)

I think more important than knowledge is pleasure when it comes to reading. If you can create pleasure in what you write I will find it a greater achievement.

About the drying up, I also feel like that. Once my imagination used to be rich with imagery of satin cloths and sharp swords. And a lot more. But all that has gone. Do you ever think about where has it all gone? Do you have any ideas what happened to all that?

[dark desire]

... but there is always something to dig and mine for, something that is more comprehensible and not just in poetry form. Short stories, plays, and books. They are not forthcoming. I'm surrounded by material in countless journals, research and inspiration coupled with what is inside of me. How on earth do I reconcile all of this into what I know to be something greater than what I have already created?

'dig' and 'mine' are the words you used. I also use them. It just struck me right now that I don't really dig or mine - those are harsher metaphors than the actual process of looking deeper. What do you think on this?

How do you know that what you are going to create is going to be better than what you have already created? You are forcing your ambition on your writing. How often do you forget to enjoy writing?

[Delta40]

'dig' and 'mine' are the words you used. I also use them. It just struck me right now that I don't really dig or mine - those are harsher metaphors than the actual process of looking deeper. What do you think on this?

How do you know that what you are going to create is going to be better than what you have already created? You are forcing your ambition on your writing. How often do you forget to enjoy writing?

I've written enough poems to know that the next one is not necessarily going to be greater than the one before. I also know my own creativity is there in me and around me. Don't make assumptions about me forcing my ambition. We can use alot of terms such as bubbling under the surface, marinating within etc. It doesn't matter. Writing is a craft and for me, as for anyone it is a personal experience. I feel both the joy and pain of writing as I follow its journey. I asked the question because this is where I am right now. A writer who is on the brink of putting together a wonderful piece of work. The issue is not merely creative but practical.

[stlukesguild]

JBI- The Romantic myth of writing as a personal exercise ignores the reality that art has an implied artist most of the time.

The American confessional tradition that took over during and after the Beat generation basically cut itself off from community outside itself.

Some authors and artists create only for themselves. Therefore they can be dismissed. Even authors who do not want money but merely want recognition must realize art is not an onanistic behavior.

I largely agree with JBI, here. As much as I love Romanticism, I distrust the Romantic myths of the artist creating solely for the self without regard for the audience. In many ways, such a self-centered, onanistic approach to creating has led to a cul-de-sac of hermeticism is which a good deal of Modern and Contemporary art no longer has the least relevance to the culture as a whole... or even to a majority of that portion of the culture that is passionate about the arts.

I always admired Poe's essay upon the process of writing. In spite of the fact that he was clearly of the Romantic strain and stressed concepts of the inner mind, he was also clearly conscious as to what he was doing as an artist. Of course I suspect a good deal of the Romantic notion that reduces art to nothing more than self expression or plumbing the depths of one's inner being and merely spilling this upon the page... or the canvas... or whatever, is in actuality rooted in youth and inexperience.

Desolation- The best advice I've ever heard, and I don't remember the source, is to "Write the book that you want to read." I guess that's all you really can do, though.

To a great extent I agree with this as well. As an art-lover I am drawn to art because I love the experience art gives and I take a great deal of pleasure in the elements of art... even when the work of art conveys or deals with a subject that is in itself inherently challenging... unsettling... painful. As an artist, however, I suspect that I have been drawn to the act of creation in part because I feel a certain void... and have the need or desire... or arrogance to imagine that I could create something that would fill that void... something I want to look at... and perhaps others as well.

I think there is a certain tenuous balancing act here. On the one side I am creating that which I believe in... that which I can create. I never forget the potential audience. I have no use for the naive Romantics whose attitude is a middle-finger lifted toward the wants and desires of the audience. But I largely imagine an audience not unlike myself... with similar likes and wants. The trick is to connect with the audience that supports your work once the work is finished.

Someone said in an earlier post that an intellectual question about writing will be better than my question. And then there was no dearth of people admiring him that yes 'that' is the question one should address. Why?... it takes a lot of courage to go there. Two or three people did go to that deeper turf. I am a little annoyed with people's defenses in such a safe place.

Why do you assume that the comments concerning the artist taking the audience into consideration are inherently shallow? Attempting to divide the creative process into self-conscious intellect (bad) vs expression of inner feelings (good) is a rather naive notion of the process of creativity.

I can write about myself, my strange life. When I write there is a lot of I and my and sometimes I alienate and write he, but I always write about myself. Even on posts here I talk more about me and less about other stuff. I have tried very hard for people around to understand me, my troubles but they were never interested. So I also buried things within me and kept moving. And I walked and walked putting everything inside me into graves for four years.

I want to reclaim what I have lost. I want to know if there is something to reclaim.

Is art nothing more than personal therapy? Certainly you cannot avoid infusing a good deal of self-expression into the work of art, but very few individuals past the age of self-centered adolescence are interested in another's personal demons and angst for their own sake. The word "ART" is not unrelated to "ARTIFICE" and as such acknowledges the reality that art involves giving one's perceptions an ARTFUL form. Unless the work is aesthetically pleasing it's not likely you will garner any audience... however profound your subject may be.

I do want my writing to be a publishing success but I am finding commercial success and concerns with commercial success very redundant. Great writers were often not publishing successes in their own times - Wilde, Kierkegaard, Lawrence, Jean Rhys and innumerable others while almost all the best selling authors fill me up with disgust. If the process of writing has to be devoted to worldly ideas of success and economics then I refuse to see value in such writings.

Actually, any number of Wilde's plays did quite well, and I am more than certain he would have wholly rejected any notion of art as nothing more than personal examination and self-expression. Wilde recognized that without the aesthetic, art was little more than mental Onanism.

[tonywalt]

Just an aside first. I have not seen that little gem from dear old Oscar before, brilliant:



It's incredible, I'm sure he keeps on writing even after his death!

Anyway, should be question not be about how something is written as opposed to what? Other than that I don't really understand the question sorry.

That's a brilliant quote and knowing it will avoid one alot of inner conflict.

The old cliche, writing about what you know(and like) is the golden rule. I write about content that is character driven (and not a little bit semi-autographical). This type of content streams out of me with great quantity and a sort of automatic quality, as when you pull the tab on a coolbox(ice chest).

When I write about things of no interest, for instance forced heirship laws in France(as I am being paid to do at this moment), my writing becomes a chore and the outcome a chore to read.

[stlukesguild]

I think more important than knowledge is pleasure when it comes to reading. If you can create pleasure in what you write I will find it a greater achievement.

Are you speaking of taking pleasure yourself, or the audience taking pleasure in your creation. Personally, I completely reject the notion that the artist must suffer to create. As the poet and Dante translator, John Ciardi suggested, adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. I make art with the intention of reaching an audience... even selling... but ultimately I know other more certain ways of making a living. I make art, and would continue to make art even if someone with a crystal ball assured me that I would never sell another painting... for the simple reason that I enjoy painting... I enjoy the process in spite of the challenges... in spite of the discipline it entails... perhaps just as some of us enjoy such challenging pleasures as reading Chaucer in the original Middle English or solving cross-word puzzles.

[JBI]

I think more important than knowledge is pleasure when it comes to reading. If you can create pleasure in what you write I will find it a greater achievement.

Are you speaking of taking pleasure yourself, or the audience taking pleasure in your creation. Personally, I completely reject the notion that the artist must suffer to create. As the poet and Dante translator, John Ciardi suggested, adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. I make art with the intention of reaching an audience... even selling... but ultimately I know other more certain ways of making a living. I make art, and would continue to make art even if someone with a crystal ball assured me that I would never sell another painting... for the simple reason that I enjoy painting... I enjoy the process in spite of the challenges... in spite of the discipline it entails... perhaps just as some of us enjoy such challenging pleasures as reading Chaucer in the original Middle English or solving cross-word puzzles.

It's strange how everyone interpreted my remarks as being about money and fame. My point was it is about sharing with an audience - the professional artist is a rather new idea - virtually everybody educated was writing for audiences in much of the world for the longest time without even a thought of financial gain.

It isn't even reducible to aesthetics, in that something like rhetoric demonstrates that a tradition of writing can exist with its implications valued purely in the communicative abilities of its form.

The primary tendency of art was to convey, as conveyance implies an audience, art therefore is trying to convey something to the audience. Be that a ritual vessel or a bronze sculpture, a poem, a novel, or someone signing their name or wet cement.

As western people mostly, our preoccupation was with competition primarily, and religion secondarily. Therefore, Greek and Roman art is preoccupied with a sort of showing off - Greek art to my eyes more through expression and creativity, and Roman art more through perfection and scale. Something like that can be read in most traditions.

The Hebrew mentality seems more preoccupied with the conveyance of a form of wisdom/righteousness, and is devoid of heroism. The hymn's aesthetic rests in its ability to use language in praise of its subject, God, or whomever else. That is why there are so many acrostic pieces written in Classical Hebrew, in that the use of language and rhetoric in support of the text, and in interpretation of the text dominated, and still dominates the tradition.

The Talmud is an interesting example of it, in that the text works to catalog oral accounts of famous sayings about the scripture and law - there is the absence of the tradition of cataloging ships and weapons as seen in Greece, which is preoccupied primarily with showing off instead of religious rite.

To skip over to China as a counterexample, there is the emergence of divergent traditions, used primarily as a strange form of memesis. Bronze vessels in the Anyang tradition, which makes up all the famous ones we know of outside of China all have the social function of declaring a political legitimacy. Their art, and function is designed to convey the status of the user, the royal class, who had a monopoly over the technology. As the technology became standardized and more easily used, designs became more elaborate, reflecting political spreading of influence - Shaminist imagery was at its height. Eventually the forms themselves took on the role of esteem and value, and the images and design became abstract and codified - it became more important to show legitimacy by owning more, and more sets, rather than more elaborate ones.

The esteem of the item them, is put on its ability to be exclusive. If only one group of people have something, as the group widens, within themselves they must fight to determine who has the best of the lot. Such is the way with aristocracy.

Poetics themselves within the Chinese tradition preform very strangely in that they mix different concepts. The art of writing was the art of sharing, the vast majority of even famous poems being written for occasions. To write was a form of showing off, but it was also a form of association to prove you were within the right societies - taste itself is aristocratic, and the cultivatable taste demonstrates the inner value, and therefore claim an individual has to society and position. It isn't as much about belonging, or being famous, as interacting properly with those you associate with, the value resting in the capturing of the sentiment.

Other traditions still preform much differently, historically. It isn't so much about financial rewards as playing within the artistic system of function. Romanticism is just another such function, as is capitalism. Ironically the best authors and poets usually had day jobs - Eliot, editor, Stevens, Insurance Salesman, half of the Western world's art scene (and virtually all of Canada's), Government payroll through educational positions and sponsored grants.

Now that is our capitalist system, with its root in 19th century publishing. As soon as a book could be sold, it naturally became a product. The first author to really do that to any major scale, which really kicked off the library system in England, and set back publishing by about 100 years, was Sir Walter Scott, who is still read, despite being financially successful in his lifetime. Emile Zola is the best example of someone revolutionizing publishing and authorship, in that he was a pioneer of commercialism.

Now, within the capitalist grid, we consider the scoreboard, if you will, or the value system primarily through the ability for something to be sold for a profit. The bigger the sales, the better the book.

At the same time, we are not in a pure-capitalist society, so there are other traditions at work that seek to value works outside of their financial success - Romanticism entrenched that into the cultural fabric of society, and basically set up the academy to work in that way.

In other systems you have weirder situations. What does one write under communism, for instance, when financial gain is impossible? What do the State sponsored authors write during events like wartime, and revolution.

And better yet, what is the art of social identity, outside of commercial sales? Is something like peasant poetry written during the cultural revolution in China somehow elevated because its authors believed in their art and revolution more than in their wallets? The poems are still garbage, keep in mind.

As such, when one asks what to write, one must ask primarily, what tradition is one working in. In the west the tradition has always been about direct competition, and recently about the scoreboard of money. If you want to know what writes, well, write what sells. That's what society values, despite all the kicking and screaming.

Outside of that, you should write what you think people would appreciate, and enjoy reading. Thati s one way to know your work will be enjoyed, if you are good enough. If it is something enjoyable, you may not get rich, but you at least will be able to take pride in your work.

Now if you are planning on writing rants, the first thing people need to realize is that art is not about exposing the self to an audience. Most people do not care. It is about disguise and lies. It is about deception and trickery, and playing within a system that only exists for itself. That is what art is about almost always. The self has never been a dominant subject anywhere, even if Wordsworth pretended. You can see that clearly in that his best poem, 'Ode' is about mankind as a whole, and universal experience, not just himself. Tintern Abbey is similar, it is about sharing the experience, first with his sister, then with the reader.

[dark desire]

Are you speaking of taking pleasure yourself, or the audience taking pleasure in your creation.

I meant the audience taking pleasure.

The other things you said were helpful.

[Paulclem]

It struck me reading St Lukes and JBI that there is the opportunity to write and present well these days digitally. I saw a presentation from 2008 that said so many thousands of blogs were begun each day, (the numbers hardly matter as globally it will be enormous). Some will no doubt be still around and they will be increasing. You can write to your heart's content and maybe someone will read you.

Then there's always the possibility of using what you've written unnoticed and taking it to the audience through e-books. It offers a lot of flexibility, but you still need to make that effort.

[Kyriakos]

Dark Muse, there is a quote by Franz Kafka on this, i translate:

"The most wide-spread individualism of authors is the way in which they cover-up their weaknesses".

I agree with you that the main difficulty in becomming a writer is to find what you CAN write. It took me a while to do that. After that you just brush away or minimize what you are not very good at, and stress the points you can.

Although there is another quote by Flaubert, that "the world is painted with myriads of colors, and we only use two". But ultimately no one can use all the colors without resulting to axioms such as Flaubert's, that "the writer must be invisible in his work"

[stlukesguild]

Denis Dutton's essay, Aesthetic and Evolutionary Psychology is a fascinating read that explores some of the ideas that JBI touches on concerning the raison d'etre for art:

http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_&_evolutionary_psychology.htm

5. Evolutionary Psychology: Sexual Selection

While the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection has proved to be one of the most versatile and powerful explanatory ideas in all of science, there is another, lesser-known, side of Darwinism: sexual selection. The most famous example of sexual selection is the peacock’s tail. This huge display, far from enhancing survival in the wild, makes peacocks more prone to predation. The tails are heavy, requiring much energy to grow and to drag around. This seems to be nature’s point: simply being able to manage with a tail like that functions as an advertisement to peahens: “Look at what a strong, healthy, fit peacock I am.” For discriminating peahens, the tail is a fitness indicator, and they will choose to mate with peacocks who display the grandest tails

Fundamental to sexual selection in the animal kingdom is female choice, as the typical routine for most species has males displaying strength, cleverness, and general genetic fitness in order to invite female participation in producing the next generation. With the human animal, there is a greater mutuality of choice. Geoffrey Miller holds not only that sexual selection is the source of the traits we tend to find the most endearingly human-qualities of character, talent, and demeanour — but that artistic creativity and enjoyment came into being in the Pleistocene in the process of women and men choosing sexual partners. The notion that we can alter ourselves through sexual selection is well accepted: there are striking examples of human sexual selection at work even in recent, historic times. The Wodaabe of Nigeria and Niger are beloved by travel photographers because of their geere wol festivals, where young men make themselves up, in ways that look feminine to Europeans, and dance vigorously to display endurance and health. Women then choose their favourites, preferring the tallest men with the biggest eyes, whitest teeth, and straightest noses. Over generations, the Wodaabe have grown taller than neighbouring tribes, with whiter teeth, straighter noses, etc. If it is possible to observe this kind of change in a few centuries, it is clearly possible to remake or refine Homo sapiens in tens of thousands of generations. As with natural selection, just slight choice bias over long time periods could radically reform aspects of humanity, giving us species features of personality and character that we have in effect created for ourselves. Our ancestors exercised their tastes for “warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous companions’as mates, and this shows itself both in the constitution of our present tastes and traits, and in our tendency to create and appreciate art

It is sexual selection, therefore, that is plausibly responsible for the astonishingly large human brain, an organ whose peculiar capacities wildly exceed survival needs on the African savannahs. The human brain makes possible a mind that is uniquely good at a long list of features that are found in all cultures but are difficult to explain in terms of survival benefits: “humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, morality”. From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home entertainment system, evolved to help our stone-age ancestors to attract, amuse, and bed each other.

As a telling example of the human self-created overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. As 98 per cent of daily speech uses only about 4,000 words, and no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene, the excess vocabulary is well explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator... Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language — including a large vocabulary and syntactic virtuosity — is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also... something that can “give a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” It would therefore have been an essential item in the inventory of mate selection criteria.

The human tendency to create amusements, to elaborate and decorate everywhere in life, is therefore a result of mate choices, accounting for the evolution of dancing, body decoration, clothing, jewellery, hair styling, architecture, furniture, gardens, artefact design, images from cave paintings to calendars, creative uses of language, popular entertainments from religious pageants to TV soaps, and music of all kinds. Artistic expression in general, like vocabulary creation and verbal display, has its origins according to sexual selection in its utility as a fitness indicator: “Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time”. This view accords with a persistent intuition about art that can be traced from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Freud: art is somehow connected, at base, to sex. The mistake in traditional art theorizing has been to imagine that there must be some coded or sublimated sexual content in art. But it is not the content per se that sexual: it is the display element of producing and admiring artists and their art in the first place that has grounded art in sexuality since the beginnings of the human race.

To the extent that art-making was a fitness indicator in the Pleistocene, it would have to be something that low-fitness artists would find hard to duplicate. (Were it easy to fake, then it would not be accurate as a gauge of fitness.) The influence of the Pleistocene mind on the concept of art therefore provides us with a perspective, at least at a psychological level, on some of the modern problems of philosophical aesthetic. Consider virtuosity: if music is a series of sounds in a formal relation, why should it make any difference to us that the sounds of a Paganini caprice are also difficult to realize on a violin? From the standpoint of sexual selection theory, this is no issue: virtuosity, craftsmanship, and the skilful overcoming of difficulties are intrinsic to art as display.

And difficulty isn’t all: art also involves costliness. As the economist Thorstein Veblen has said, “The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles”. As much as this might contradict the modernist devaluing of skill and cost as central to the concept of art, it is in line with persistent popular reactions to art, showing up in the liking of skilful realistic painting, musical virtuosity, and expensive architectural details. This may not justify the philistinism of asking how much a famous museum painting is worth, but it does explain it.

Admiration for the ability to do something difficult is not unique to art: we admire athletes, inventors, skilful orators or jugglers; and admiration of skill is at least as intrinsic to art as to any other field of human endeavour . Ellen Dissanayake has identified a process of “making special’ as essential to the arts as practised from the Pleistocene to the present...It follows that almost anything can be made artistic by executing it in a manner that would be difficult to imitate. “Art” as an honorific therefore “connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement”, and so would be useful as a fitness indicator.

If this is true, the vulgar gallery remark, “My kid could paint better than that”, is vindicated as valid at least from the standpoint of sexual selection, and can be expected to be heard in popular artistic contexts for the rest of human time: people are not going to “learn” from their culture that skill does not count (any more than they will learn that general body symmetry does not indicate fitness). Moreover, even with the elites it is really not so different: the skill discriminations of elites are simply accomplished at a more rarefied level. Cy Twombly’s blackboard scribbles, which look to many ordinary folk like, well, children’s blackboard scribbles, are viewed by high-art critics as demonstrating an extremely refined artistic skill. That the works do not obviously show skill to the uninitiated simply demonstrates that they are being produced at a level that the unsophisticated cannot grasp. The esoteric nature of art, and with its status and hierarchy, thus remains in place.

In many ways, this supports JBI's notion of art as competition. I agree that in certain cultures... whether it be ancient Hebrew or Medieval European Christian... there is not so much a striving by the individual artist for recognition... but rather art supports the communally shared values and beliefs, and as such the artists often remain anonymous. One imagines that they don't even think of themselves as "artists" in the contemporary sense... rather they are but master craftsmen whose efforts are put forth in the praise of God for after all, whatever talents they do have were given to them by God and the are but vessels or tools employed by the only true "creator".

It isn't so much about financial rewards as playing within the artistic system of function. Romanticism is just another such function, as is capitalism. Ironically the best authors and poets usually had day jobs - Eliot, editor, Stevens, Insurance Salesman, half of the Western world's art scene (and virtually all of Canada's), Government payroll through educational positions and sponsored grants.

Of course one might argue that there is a direct link between attainment of positions of rank (librarian to the Pope or an influential Cardinal, tenured professor at a major university, etc...) and the reputation of the individual writer based upon his or her writings. We can see this is true of many of the writers of a given degree of notoriety prior to commercialized printing and widespread literacy both of which were necessary for commercial publication. In many ways this is a key difference between the visual arts and literature. The finest art works were always seen as luxury objects that demanded a high price. Any acknowledged "master" (especially under the earlier guild system) would be as assured of a decent living wage in return for his artistic efforts as a licensed plumber, electrician, or doctor might be today.

Now that is our capitalist system, with its root in 19th century publishing. As soon as a book could be sold, it naturally became a product.

Again there remains a unique difference between the marketability of the book (or the work of music) as a product, and the work of visual art. The writer has the advantages and disadvantages of writing for a mass audience. The successful writer, musician, film-maker is capable of reaching a large audience and as such his or her work is seen as having a certain "relevance" to the culture. At the same time, these artists are dependent upon attracting a large enough audience... and there are always questions of pandering to the audience. As JBI suggests, many of the writers, composers, etc... whose works are more "challenging" (ie. less popular with a large audience) are dependent upon day jobs... often related or directly linked to their reputations: professors, lecturers, recipients of government payroll through educational positions and sponsored grants. The visual art object, on the other hand, remains a luxury object... largely reserved for an elite wealthy audience. As such, the visual artists are less responsive to public opinion... but also less relevant.

Two strong novels that deal with questions of the role of the artist in the 20th century in relationship to the desire of the audience and the patrons of power are Hermann Hesse' Glass Bead Game and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. They may be something you might wish to look into, Dark Desire. Neither offers simple answers... but rather posit some provocative questions.

[Alexander III]

A quick semantics question - why do you guys keep calling it the romantic myth, if anything it should be called the modernist myth. Last time I checked romanticism was hugely popular in their time(also after) they were all writing about what the audience of that time wanted.

The whole masturbatory effect really is more in the modernists. I love Pound and I don't mind elliot - but come on that right there is the epitonone of writing for the self, the whole modernist movement was about writing for the self, and **** the audience unless they are like me and get it. Romanticism was huge and everyone read that stuff. Modernism never became huge. Influential yes, but that everyone from the servant boy and the rural peasant to the duchesses daughter and the cabinet of ministers - was into it no.

[Lykren]

This is not mean to prove a point, just raise a question.

If art is a performance and a competition therein, is it not yet possible to create a performance without being aware
of an audience? If so, what manner of technique could be utilized to create such a performance?

[lomihaofy]

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[JBI]

St Lukes, what do you make of print art then - should we see painting and such in the transition toward becoming a print-art culture, like how everyone can buy a xerox of famous paintings in the museum gift shop, or find them on cards and such. The idea of reproducible art is not new, but the scale has an ability to make it super-reproducible. Take you for example, you, from what I remember, have not been to the big Museums abroad, but you are probably more familiar with their collections than most people who have been there. You are the "victim" if you will of the new age of freely distributed art. The luxury item idea is in itself in transition. In Japan it has been for god knows how long. Think of how many of those woodblock prints you have seen - they are everywhere. I even have some originals on my wall - because they are prints, and therefore one can put out as many as one wants. I think art will eventually head down those lines.

Architecture is far more private a form - you physically need to see the building to "get it". You cannot move a building.

[Summer M]

Very interesting discussion, and I'm glad it was resurrected so I could partake.

JBI and stlukesguild make some excellent points, however I remember reading in an introduction to a collection of Henry James stories that, according to the writer of that introduction, one of James's greatest strengths was that he didn't care about what people think or want, which also explains why his writing is so difficult at times. I think about it a lot as I read James, and I am slowly coming to recognize James as the greatest novelist ever (in my opinion, of course), so I take great interest in comments about his work. Perhaps not caring about your audience can lead to great works of art at times?

As for Denis Dutton: the man was a very interesting writer, and I strongly recommend his work, but let us not take him too seriously about sexual selection. The man was not a scientist, and this shows in his writing. The first sentence quoted by stlukesguild shows Dutton's ignorance: sexual selection is "another, lesser-known side of Darwinism"?? I'd be hard-pressed to think of something better known than sexual selection!

[namenlose]

Perhaps not caring about your audience can lead to great works of art at times?

When you say "not caring about your audience", are you refering to an artist that does not produce deliberately for a defined public, or do you mean one who is not preoccupied about producing something which could appeal for the common reader? William Blake for instance was unpopular in his time, the majority of his works being concerned with his personal mithology and unorthodox spiritual views, but I doubt he did not wrote his poetry with its aesthetic consistency in mind. Kafka and Dickinson wrote primarily for themselves, but even in their works there is an evident care with the form and the artistic coherence.

I believe James' case would also be the former rather than the latter. His writing was clearly experimental at times and he explored new literary techniques and genres, but it does not mean he had no interest in the presentation of his work to the public. Perhaps he was aware, as Stendhal was, that such an approach could not be exactly positive to his popularity, but it does not mean he did not thought of his novels as a form of performance. After all, he highly respected Madame Bovary, a novel known for its formal perfection, while Dickens's novels, created with the intent of appealing to a larger audience, were regarded by him as superficial pieces.

Even Joyce and Proust, known today as difficult authors, composed their masterpieces profoundly rooted in their respective traditions. Perhaps they were not concerned with being widely read by the general population as Dickens was, but they wanted to present their art as something relevant to the reader. The issue is that there are different ways to approach the presentation of artistic works, but the presentation tends to be always significant nonetheless. There is a great difference between someone who does not care about the public at all and someone who employs a different approach towards the reader in spite of the possible risks.