Via Byliner, I came across this excellent essay by Alexander Nazaryan. Never heard of him before. According to his bio at the end of his essay, which appeared at Salon.com, he's "on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, where he edits the Page Views book blog" and "He is at work on his first novel. Really."
The latter is signicant because before this he was apparently a jag of a book critic. The essay explains why. It was a pretty cool piece, and I really appreciated its honesty. I don't like all of it, but there were some parts I liked a lot. I've boiled it down to what I did like with these few brief passages below. You can read the whole thing here.
I write. It is what I have always done, searching for what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.”
I want more than just wisdom — every writer does, outside the most hopeless of naïfs. Like most of my fellow scribes, I also yearn for fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order. Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.” I would also like to write a play and perhaps some poetry, if there is time.
If you do not want your own version of the above, if you are indeed a reasonable and/or responsible young man or woman, then literature is not for you. If you have a compelling personal story to tell, tell it to a therapist. An MBA will do you far more good than an MFA. Pursue writing only if you are pathologically unable to pursue anything else. Otherwise, consider advertising.
William Faulkner once said that the artist is “a creature driven by demons — he usually doesn’t know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
I know I should be thankful for a successful career in journalism. Indeed, I am. But the novel for me has always been the very best thing humans can do with words, and words are the very closest we get to God [...]
By the time Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950, he was largely forgotten, so that the award must have been a cruel reminder of his erstwhile greatness. They had to drag him to Stockholm from the swamps of Mississippi, and though the creator of Yoknapatawpha County went with great reluctance, he delivered the most forceful defense of literature made in the last century:
The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat … He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Take the above passage as a litmus test: If you find it romantic and impractical, you have no business writing. But if you hear the demon that Faulkner heard, if the above passage fills you with urgency about your own craft, however imperfect it may yet be, then you and I are brothers in arms.
Write on.
(Image totally cribbed from the source article link.)
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