My best teacher in high school, the one who really got me writing, used to talk about how T.S. Eliot would go to libraries and stand in the stacks, reading literary criticism of his work and giggling. I hope one day I'll get to that level of healthy detachment about people's reactions to my work.
I haven't really written much in about a week, on the blog or on my projects, because I had an experience that kind of upset me and I've been...rebuilding. I read a story of mine to some family members, and they ended up understanding way too much about me, myself, from hearing it. It's inevitable, I suppose, that people look for the writer behind the words, but I wasn't prepared for them to be so right. My listeners last week are kind people, of course, and didn't abuse the knowledge in any way, but it was scary to realize how much I can apparently reveal about myself without intending to at all.
Let me clarify that none of the characters in the story were me, none of their experiences were like mine, and I didn't write with any intention of revealing myself. It's just that you (or I, anyway) have to use my own emotional impulses, the things I find happy and the things I find sad and the things I find interesting, to write, because I have nothing else. Maybe that's what they mean by "writing what you know" - I've always wondered. As a writer, I suppose I'm a little bit like a method actor, needing to find the reality in myself before I can write about it convincingly.
But I found it really scary and upsetting, to discover that I can be so transparent in my writing, and I've had to process the revelation. But I've decided it's a bit of an occupational hazard of being any kind of an artist - you put your deepest self at the service of others and the truth. That's why certain roles are exhausting for actors, why it hurts so much to have your work rejected.
And I am driving home this truth to myself by posting about it on the blog where anybody can read it. So there.
Hey! I am sorry this is still lingering over you! I totally agree - it is an occupational hazard. more people will be bound to look too deeply into your writing or simply not enough... and that in the end is not really your fault.
ReplyDeleteI am going to give you a call on my lunch break today! (Noon, my time, which is one yours!)
Kelsey has forgotten her Blogger password, but that's no reason why I should be the ONLY one to benefit from her wisdom.
ReplyDeleteShe says:
I know how you feel. Its one of the travails of being a creative person. You are creating an externalization of your inner processes. Not in the overtly intentioned, therapy session way of "this is me, let me tell you how I feel," but in the shear process of creation. Creation is a pure product of your inner world, you have made manifest your own way of being in the very act of putting pen to paper. I too have come up against this, realizing that in doing the work I do, in being true to my my vision, the world I am both being and bringing into being, I am exposing myself to be in the world in a way that I had for a long time tried to conceal. I was more honest in the presentation of my work than I was in the presentation of my life.
As my mother once said, looking at my work is like having a window into my brain. And I found this exposure unbearably humiliating, so for many years would disavow my work completely. But the older I get, the more comfortable I am being seen, through my art and through my life, and I no longer so much mind having a window into my soul.
There is a cliche in the visual arts, that all portraits are really self-portraits of the artist who painted them.