The Writing Life: November 2007 Archives

Is our writing supposed to be a stew or a soup?

Stew is hearty, meaty goodness. It's seasoned and thick. Starches from the potatoes mix with the vegetables and the beef gets tender only after many hours of cooking. The longer you cook it, the better. It stands up well to being re-heated and tastes almost as good the second or third time as it did the first.

Soup is, by nature, lighter and less filling. It's mostly broth. Maybe some noodles or a few pieces of this and that. Maybe thick, like stew, but often thin, like broth. Soup doesn't always stand up to re-heating like stew does. It's usually best the first time around. While it might have some bits of meat, that's not the focus of the dish. It's not a meal in a bowl, but an appetizer, or the center of a light lunch.

Some authors write stew, some soup.

Which are you?

Is it acceptable to write material that is praised for its artistic achievement when obtaining that requires using techniques that go "over the head" of people who don't see reading as consumption of art, but as enjoyment?

Do we shoot the wounded so they won't be slowing us down?

If Art's purpose is to efficiently communicate ideas and abstract concepts that can't be communicated with the same fidelity and efficiency in any other form, and an artist creates work that doesn't effectively communicate, but (intentionally or unintentionally) obfuscates, is it really Art?

Does making a distinction between Art and Entertainment have any real, practical meaning?

Isn't the creation and consumption of Art one of the most Democratic and timeless of all human activities?

No matter the socio-political situation of the consumers of Art, democracy reigns when it comes to the consumption of Art. Even when Art's form and function was mandated by the Church, there was still an element of democracy in the consumers of Art deciding who gets to keep doing it and who doesn't.

There is no Arts Dictator who can force us to consume a kind of Art we don't like. Especially if that Art and our entertainment overlap. Neither can we put in place a non-democratic form of arts consumerism that supplants an individual's right to accept our Arts offering or to reject it.

We can't make people like and accept our work, or ourselves (for artists, the two are interminably intertwined), even if they should like it because—and of course we would know—it's better for them than that other drivel.

The painful part of this whole process is that the best we can do is do the best we can do. Then we put our work out in the marketplace and watch it succeed or fail on its own merits.

Sometimes our work isn't accepted. Sometimes we are not accepted.

So we try again.

I've been going back over some of the old posts and organizing things a little better now that I've converted the site over to MovableType 4. I ran across this little piece of creative non-fiction that I wrote as a posting on the school's bulletin board in our discussion of Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener". I have to say, it's a work of pure brilliance! Or, something:

An Analysis of Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'

I felt like I should fish it out of obscurity because I liked it so much. Sometimes, you just end up having a love affair with your own words...