Ruminations on Writing
Back in August, a writing friend contacted me with the admission that over the last few months he had been suffering from creative paralysis. He explained, “I was mired in self-pity by lack of response and under-appreciation of what I was doing by the populous. I put the brakes on everything and climbed into the ditch.”
To me, the most telling part of this statement was the prepositional phrase, “by the populous.” My friend didn’t hate his most recent project. He wasn’t frustrated that his work wasn’t turning out the way he had originally envisioned it. It wasn’t criticism that sent him into a creative tailspin. Instead, it was the the feeling that despite all of the energy he had poured into his writing, giving his writing to the world was tantamount to shouting as loudly as he could to a room full of people who ignored him.
On this blog in the past I have facetiously referred to this phenomenon when I addressed my readers as “both of you.” The inference is that my words, pounded on plastic and visible on pixels, will reach a net audience of two. (Note the dual meanings of net…just another example of why I deserve to have more than two readers.)
Writers write from an implicit assumption that there will be at least one reader. The author writes, and the reader reads. Otherwise writing is the tree of the proverbial forest: if you write but no one reads it, do your words make a sound?
The construction of a poem or a story or a book can require an investment of time. For Raceboy and Super Qwok Adventures, I spent as much time in the post-writing process of editing and layout as I spent on the composition process: it was truly like working a third job. I realized that even if I were to add up the total amount of time my readers spend reading my words, the sum of their time will still not be likely to exceed the amount of time I personally invested in bringing that work to life. There is not a word or term in English to identify the point where the invested time of the reader exceeds the invested time of the content creator, but it is likely that a great many works do not ever break even.
When my friend faced this unarticulated realization about his total invested time versus the total time his readers had invested reading his work, he recognized that he had worked hard for a very small — maybe even negligible — return on his investment. And that sent him into a depression.
For most of my life I imagined a writer’s words to be chiseled in the stones of time, etched for eternity to be read, pondered, appreciated, like constellations in the sky. It’s only been over the last six years as I’ve worked at the library that I’ve realized the impermanence of a writer’s words. The books that fill the library shelves live only while they have readers. I faced an entire shelf of Frank Slaughter’s books, none of which had been checked out in the last thirty years, and finally purged them to free shelf space. Slaughter sold millions of books over his career, but that career ranged from the 1940s to the 1980s. By 2010, they were ignored, possibly irrelevant, and essentially dead.
In the January 2013 issue of Wired, Steven Levy interviewed Tim O’Reilly. When Levy asked, “What is the future of books?” O’Reilly explained, “…I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthonre writing The House of Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.”
O’Reilly doesn’t use the p-word, but he’s referring to our paradigms about novels when he answers the question. We expect that our assumptions about novels are eternal and unchanging much like those constellations.
But the thing is, even the constellations won’t last forever. It’s a theme that came out in a different article in the same issue of Wired on an entirely different topic. Andrew Zolli explained, “The sustainability movement has been around for four decades. I think it may have outlived its usefulness. When they tell you they want to conserve the rain forest, save the pandas, and so forth, the message is always the same: They want to maintain a beautiful little picture of stasis. But we need to recognize that stasis isn’t realistic” (pg. 22).
We are trapped in a chronological progression like beads of a pearl necklace, a progression of experienced present moments, and our expectations from one pearl to the next pearl are that the pearls are the same, have always been the same, and will always be the same. Because each pearl has been round and white, we assume that every pearl is round and white, that every necklace is made from pearls. But what is a pearl? The form of the writing may evolve, the shape of the pearl may change, could become a bead, a chain, a rope, but it will always need to have a reader.
I write for the reader who I hope someday will read my words, invest his or her time to ponder what I’ve written; I write for the someday when the sum total of the time that my readers spend reading my words adds to a greater total than the time I’ve spent writing them. I write for the possible future that I hope exists despite the likely obscurity of oblivion that is inevitable, even for the stars. In the face of entropy, I write for those moments when a reader will read my words, when a connection will take place. Andy Warhol explained, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” I write for that fifteen minutes, though it may already have happened, or it may never happen. I write for the unknown, unknowable listeners who hear the tree of my writing in the forest, who hear my shouts in a cacophonous room, who see my words glowing in a shape in the night-time sky.
