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....
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....
Before sunlight can shine through a window, the blinds must be raised - American Proverb
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.
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.Originally Posted by Delta40
shad·ow ing
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.
Otherwise, I'd tend to agree with Desolation. Being aware of your audience and pandering to it are quite different.
Last edited by Silas Thorne; 05-15-2012 at 09:09 PM.
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?
I think Delta enjoys writing, or she wouldn't be. She's just being humble here.
Before sunlight can shine through a window, the blinds must be raised - American Proverb
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.
shad·ow ing
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.
J.H.S.
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.
Before sunlight can shine through a window, the blinds must be raised - American Proverb
Authenticity defames me.
J.H.S.
In what way?
Before sunlight can shine through a window, the blinds must be raised - American Proverb
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
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
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.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
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.
Being taken literally, is like being sent to hell LITERALLY.
“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
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