Dinner is Served
THE QUESTION
The question most writers face is, “What if no one wants to hear what I have to say?â€
This is not the same question writers also face, which is, “What if I have nothing to say?
The answer to that question is, “Then don’t say anything, don’t write, and for god sake, don’t publicly interrogate it just to say something.â€
But the first question is a vexing one. Do you continue to say things no one wants to hear? How do you know NO ONE wants to hear what you have to say? If you have SOMETHING to say, presumably you yourself, as the writer, have already wanted to hear the things you have to say, because they are answers, in some way, to questions you have had, and may have shared with like-minded people.
This ultimately is an aspect of market. What role should the market play in what you write about? Suppose you have important insights into the role of insects in Alchemical thinking, but absolutely no one cares about this, outside of a few Alchemical Entomologists. One option is to find their website and start posting comments, and then, on your website, blogh about the analogous process of pupating beetles and the adept who ingests the Lapis Philosophorum. Another is you can give up entirely and make grand toasts at your loved ones major occasions.
Poets are used to this. Poets read mostly in mirrors, or at placid lakes where their image wobbles in and out of sun and cloud. But novelists are in the communication business. They are entertainers. Novelists, as Orson Welles would have it, sing for their living. They are no less inveterate in their lies than poets, but their lies are supposed to be more profitable.
“They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.â€
No one wanted to hear Bob Dylan say that everyone has to serve someone. It wasn’t until the producers of The Sopranos put it in context that I understood that song. In the context of Reagan and Falwell it meant that the greatest poet of his generation had gone nuts. In the context of Tony Soprano it meant he was still the greatest poet of his generation. He had enough money and success not to care. But I don’t think he ever cared.
An artist may have to serve someone but that doesn’t mean you slave when you sing. Being in-thrall to the muse is not boot-licking and the whip-marks of that service are not laid on by her, and it was she who took off the shackles.
This is a great post. I see some reflections of our recent communications in this.
Hey. yes, they are reflected here.
Seconded – a wonderful post. I’ve been stalled-out on writing thanks to this question for weeks now, trying to move despite myself.
There’s a bizarre metatextual insertion toward the end of A High Wind in Jamaica, that, I think, attributed to this recent frozen panic:
… a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances. (268 of NYRB Classics edition)
I’ve always written under the hackneyed pretenses of searching for ‘truth’ and all, but have never really, until this passage, wondered if truth was supposed to be synonymous with ‘fact.’ But maybe it is. And maybe, in this time of great pause, that’s what I’m supposed to be pining away for. Or maybe I should buck up and at least keep my ass on the saddle, even if flailing about uncontrollably.