If you’ve ever seen a singer make a mistake, you’ll notice that they immediately seem to feel bad about themselves. There is an intense shame that goes with singing poorly that does not occur when, say, a guitarist makes a mistake. If a guitarist makes a mistake while playing, the guitarist looks at his guitar; if a cellist makes a mistake, he looks at his cello; if a pianist makes a mistake, he looks at his piano. If a singer makes a mistake, he feels the misstep happen within his own body. Getting a wrong note in the middle of a guitar solo seems forgivable, and guitarists don’t seen to mind too much. A sour note from an opera singer makes us cringe, and invites shame to the person making the mistake.
Something similar happens with the arts. The more abstract something is, the more protected is the artist. A musician can reveal things about himself without ever saying exactly what those things are. I can write a sad string quartet that expresses my feelings from when my dog died, but those feelings are expressed abstractly. You needn’t know exactly what happened to me. I don’t need to write sad lyrics about a dog dying. I can just scream my sadness onto the page and hear it weeping back through the violins, the viola, and the cello. And you can hear that sadness and let it wrap around your own personal history. You can relate it to something bad that happened to you in the past, because the specific semantic content — my dog dying — is no longer present in the music. It may have inspired the music, but all that’s left over is the feeling, a kind of vaporous ghost. I can express my feelings about something without ever revealing what happened to me. Painting, similarly, can be used to express how I feel about something without necessarily saying what it is. If I’m a classical painter feeling morose about the pointlessness of modern life, I can paint Sisyphus pushing a rock up the side of a mountain made of trashed cars in a junkyard, and you can more-or-less see what I’m feeling without my needing to say it outright. It’s not as protective as music, but the painter can still play coy, because his medium relies on centuries of semiotic tricks, and it’s up to the viewer to puzzle them out.
And what about writing? Well, a writer can hide in a number of ways, but the writer winds up getting the Saint Anthony treatment by a peculiar demon unique to his trade. You see, anyone can write. A musician must learn to compose, or at any rate to play, with years of practice poured into a chosen instrument and the study of counterpoint and voice-leading; a painter must learn technique, and all manner of arcana relating to vanishing points and history and how to mix paints and so on; a dancer undergoes rigorous physical training that takes a heavy toll on the body. But a writer? A writer need not do anything except write, and the writer’s training is just reading. But, but, but: anyone can read, in our age of universal literacy, and anyone can write. Musicians, composers, painters, dancers, actors, and so on, can all lay claim to some skill unique to their craft. The writer, by contrast, has a much higher cliff to climb. The writer, you see, does not do anything else that other people cannot do. Anyone can write, but the writer claims to write better. Anyone can read, but the writer claims to read better. The writer must read more broadly and more deeply than people who do not write. He must read things that the layman would never read. He must chew things up and digest them more thoroughly than is normally required of a student. And his writing must reflect this. It’s not just about crafting good prose. Indeed, many engineers and scientists and philosophers are excellent writers on the prose front. It’s more that the prose of a writer must reflect his erudition; the depth of his learning; the depth of his contemplation; the depth of his torment. Remember what I said at the beginning of this paragraph. The writer cannot lay claim to any special skill. He is doing something that anybody else can do, and if that is to be worthwhile, then he must do it better than they do. This is the curse of writing: it is not a peculiar skill, but requires peculiar talent. In the other arts, one can lean on one’s technical prowess. Writing, more than any other discipline, rests on the quality of the writer as an individual. The question is not, “What is your craft?” but “Who are you?” If you can play the guitar, then a layman can at least say, “Well! Even if he’s not great, he can play a guitar. I can’t do that.” If you can do a convincing pencil sketch, then your audience can say, “He can draw realistic figures with his hands. I can’t do that.” But writing? As of the late 20th century, anyone can write. As a writer, you have no skill that anyone else doesn’t have. You can only claim to do it better than they can.
The writer’s demon stands revealed as a kind of shame analogous to that of the singer. But while the singer’s shame is more immediate, the writer’s is more profound. The singer can hide behind technique, to some degree, and while his mistakes may hurt more in the short term, they can eventually be compensated for by further training. The writer has no such luck. No matter how much lyrical, flowery prose he can craft — alternately, no matter how much Hemingway grit he displays — the writer eventually stands spiritually naked in front of the audience. Truth will out. Read enough of a writer, and you will understand who he really is. That’s the problem: over time, the layers of anonymity will wear away, and the reader can make their judgment. There is no defense. If you want to write, you must be willing to be seen. Because writing, more than any other art form, comes out of who we are, it is ultimately the most revelatory of the arts, and this goes for both prose and poetry. Imagine ripping off your clothes in front of a crowd of people — and then your skin — and then your muscles — and then your bones fall to the ground, and you’re as naked as a consciousness can possible be. This is what’s at stake if you want to write. You can’t hide behind technique. Your worth as a writer is in your worth as a human being. Words, in themselves, are not worth very much. “Talk is cheap”. But are you enough to make up for the valuelessness of talk?
And so we can name the writer’s demon. That demon is named diffidence. Once you’ve bared your soul, you have to face the consequences. You will either be judged worthy or unworthy. Either you had the talent and it was worth it to strip off everything and show who you really are, or you should never have even tried. Fear of that second judgment is what prevents people from writing in the first place. Even if you work at a day job, even if you have some other profession, choosing to be a writer by avocation is a heavy decision. You are constantly faced with the question: do you really want to write? By doing so, you are inviting a fundamental judgment. If your writing fails, then that is unequivocally a judgment on you as a human being. You chose to do something you should never have tried to do. And so every would-be writer dances around at the edge of self-revelation, steeling himself to step over the line.
And that’s why I drink.
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Maybe the ancients were right - Speaking > Writing? Scattered to the wind as it passes our lips.
If someone constantly faces the question of whether or not they really want to write, then I think that writing as a profession isn't suitable for them. If someone claims to be a writer, they ought to not have much question about it -- it's something they should have a passion for and want to do.
"If your writing fails, then that is unequivocally a judgment on you as a human being. You chose to do something you should never have tried to do." There are those writers who fail a lot but who over time become good or even great writers.