Monday, June 23, 2003
I've been trying to break to incite forward momentum. Reading Charles Fort's New Lands again. Playing hours and hours and hours of Tomb Raider. Yesterday, I saw Finding Nemo (a delight).
And Spooky and I read through the prologue and first two chapters of MOA yesterday. We'll read the remainder today. Then it will all be in my head again. And then no more Procrastination. Nor Distraction. Nor any of the other Seven Deadly Sins (of which there are actually nine). Then I write this goddamn book. For better or worse. I think I've wasted months second-guessing myself. There are other difficulties, but the second-guessing thing, it happens. The futile preoccupation with what I have done already, those other books, which I do not know how I wrote, or why, or have any idea why they worked for most readers, or why they didn't work for some other readers. I will write this book, with what remains of the summer, and send it away to The World, and it will sink or swim and I will have very little (as in "no") say in the matter. I never do. I just lose sight of that fact sometime. I write. I cannot write for anyone. Most times, I can't even write for me. I just write. These are my stories. I cannot learn from past "mistakes," because there is no objective standard by which to judge whether or not a mistake was made.
It is my job to write a book, not to concern myself with what people will think of that book. What they will think is neither relevant to the act of writing nor to the merit of the book. Public opinion cannot be a guide, ever. All it can tell me is that lots of people like X, which can mean anything and may mean nothing at all. John Grisham and Dean R. Koontz and Michael Crichton and Robert Jordan and James Patterson are not better writers than Thomas Ligotti or Kathe Koja or Ramsey Campbell or China Mieville, and the New York Times bestseller list and public opinion and market stats can all go fuck themselves. The world wants oatmeal. It is not my job to give the world oatmeal. It is my job not to be a hack. It is my job to try to make the world chew, lest its lazy jaw muscles atrophy and its collective mandible withers and all its teeth fall out. It is my job, as a writer, to give the world toffee and peanut brittle and tough steak and celery. I write peanut butter sandwiches, not oatmeal. And every time some dolt whines, "I'm confused" or "I don't understand" or "This doesn't make any sense," I should smile and know that I'm doing my job. Not because it is my job to be opaque, but because it is not my job to be transparent.
And I know when I am making sense, and whenever I allow the dolts to spin me round, blindfolded, until I've accepted the disorientation they spread like lice, I am to kick myself in the ass until I can find true north again.
This is not a pep talk. This is simply the truth that I forget, because publishing (more often than not, writing's moron pimp) seeks forever to confuse quality and quantity, accessibility and art. And now I am only remembering.
Postscript - This is not to say that I don't want an audience, that I don't need and crave an audience, that I see the point in doing this without an audience. It is merely to say that I must always find the audience on my terms, not theirs.
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