BoM/TWS Message Forum

The trouble comes from an idea (a very old idea, 'tis true) that writing is a kind of performance. That just as it would be cheating to use wires (or a pogo stick) to execute a grand jete in a performance of "Swan Lake", it is cheating to use anything but your own soul when writing. It's an idea that goes back to conceits of poets as being possessed by spirits or gods, or being inspired by a Muse, through the Romantic myth of Promethean creation, and all the way up today to the creator as a kind of genius whose works emerge after wrestling with some kind of inner demon.

Whereas any professional writer who isn't try to blow smoke up the ass of a PBS interviewer will tell you that writing is much more like basketweaving. You're trying to get the goddam thing made so you can sell it, and if someone hands you a tool that makes the job go faster or easier, you will kiss them on the lips.

Dancing, acting, playing an instrument: these are performative arts. How you do it is what counts. Choreography, writing, composing: these are craftsman-like arts. What you produce is what counts. (Mozart got some his musical ideas not from God but from a bird he owned.)

A writer who performs brilliantly as a cross of Goethe, Hemingway and David Foster Wallace, but produces work at the level of Ed Wood Jr., is a fraud. A writer who produces Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear because there's a buck in it (and who revises his plays after the players have had a go at it and told him what works, what doesn't, and how to fix it, and who steals every plot that isn't nailed down in order to meet his deadlines) is the artist.