Thursday, September 04, 2003
This is one of those mornings when, perhaps because of my uneasy dreams, and perhaps for no knowable reason, I wake with a head full of thoughts that make it very, very difficult to get into the writing place. The resolve to set aside everything else and look only at The Story is weak and just getting started takes three or four times the effort it would take on most days. So, I'm sitting here, staring at the screen (the screen, not the blank page), listening to the new Crüxshadows ep, Frozen Embers (which is quite good), looking for a way in, and a way around, or through, the obstructing thoughts.
As a writer, my first concern, my foremost concern, should be for my words, stories, characters, the worlds I create and must bear responsibility for. That's all simple enough. It ought to be simple enough. I am a writer. I write. I write what I need to write, to please myself or pay the bills, whichever is most important at any given moment.
I do not write to please or entertain you - the collective You - and I can only hope that this doesn't come as a dissappointment to any of the singular You. If you are entertained or enlightened or, well, whatever, then that's a marvelous by-product of my work. But it's not my purpose. It never has been, and I doubt it ever shall be. I am not an entertainer, or a teacher. I'm just a writer. I'm not a celebrity or a hipster maven. I think I spent the earliest years of my career thinking that, in order to be a successful writer, I had to be all of those things, too. But now I see that I am a successful writer and I am none of these things. I am free to write what I need to write - to please myself and pay the bills - and the rest of it is only Distraction. I am slowly coming to understand, and accept, that.
In an age when celebrity and wealth seem the only worthwhile pursuits, it's much too easy to lose your way, when you are, in fact, a writer. Not only a writer, mind you. When you are a writer.
I have friends who are writers and who are also celebrities and wealthy. And too often I make the mistake of measuring myself against them. Not against their art, which is all that matters, at the end of things, but against their pop culture or mass-media clout. Pop culture and mass media have almost nothing to do with writing. It matters what I've written, and if I am pleased with it, and if I have been truthful, and if I have brought more light than darkness into the world. These things matter immensely. But how many books I've sold, and whether or not I'm a "household name," and whether I've made the cover of Publisher's Weekly, and whether my signings draw hundreds or thousands, these things matter only in so much as I accept the perverse mantra of this age.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I have the same unhealthy love of money and material possessions as most Americans. I have the same cravings for fame and celebrity that Hollywood and television have imbued so many of us with. And if it comes my way, I'll be waiting for it with roses and chocolates and open arms. But, the thing that I have to keep reminding myself, the thing which I forgot for a long time, is that I am a writer. Fame is a crap-shoot, entirely unrelated to art, entirely unpredicatble and fleeting. I cannot judge my success as an author by market reports and sales figures and the number of fan letters I receive. I can only judge it by how I feel about what I have written, and, perhaps, to a lesser degree, how authors and other thinking people feel about what I have written. The rest of it is hubris and white noise. And deadly Distraction.
I may write films, one day soon, and I may never sell a screenplay so long as I live. I may one day see one of my books on the New York Times Bestseller List, or I may spend the rest of my life labouring in relative obscurity. Someday, my work may be converted to video games, stickers, lunch boxes, action figures, trading cards, television franchises, and theme park rides, and, so far as my agent, my publishers, my bank account, and I'm concerned, that'd be just fine. But to think that any of these things have anything at all to do with my worth as a writer is the worst sort of delusion and idiocy.
I have to watch for the pretty traps, always.
Yesterday, I wrote about 550 words on Murder of Angels, and entirely rewrote the scene I wrote back last Wednesday. I've never much needed to rewrite, but I think this book is asking it of me, more and more. Before all is said and done, I may be rewriting a good portion of its beginning, now that i now where it's going and why it's going there. I hope to finish Chapter Eight in the next couple of days.
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