The Talking Dead

From the Millions, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Killer Advice by Todd Hasak-Lowy:

Eugenides explains, writing as if you’re dead, or as if your writing will only appear after you’re dead, will prevent you from following literary fashion, writing for money, censoring your true feelings, etc., because all these things will “suppress the very promptings that got” the writer “writing in the first place.”

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But there’s a powerful counterargument that challenges Eugenides’s advice as both simplistic and naïve. And perhaps stemming from a bit of bad faith as well. If the writer has any goals whatsoever beyond just creating a story and storing it in the relative privacy of his hard drive, then other factors necessarily come into play. In other words, if someone aims not just to write, but to get published as well, and not just published, but widely read too (not to mention make enough money to justify spending even more time writing in the future), then the situation — process actually — turns into something a good bit more complicated.

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Here’s what Eugenides should have added by way of closing: the so-called writer has to wear all sorts of hats: writer, reader, editor, negotiator, businessman, self-promoter, etc. And only the first of these hats should never be worn outside one’s private necropolis. The next two have the odd responsibility of communing — patiently, cautiously, and courageously — with the dead self.