If a Book Falls in the Forest

I have been mulling over a comment that Nienke Hinton made some time back. I first wrote about it in a post called "Defining Success":

I think, for the most part, writers write simply because they must. One blogger (unfortunately I can't remember who) recently asked people if they'd still write even if they never had the chance of publishing. I think every commenter said yes.

Yet, I think we all play the fantasy of becoming rich and famous in our heads every once in a while. For example, I love reading "The Call" stories and reading about how writers made it. I'll keep writing even if I never have those stories to tell of my own.

Reflecting on this idea of writing, even without the chance of publication, I came to see a distinction between the work of writing and the purpose of writing.

The work of writing is often a solo task. Getting ideas, doing research, labouring over the creation of a draft, editing and revising--we don't require readers or publishing companies to do these things. It's nice to have a writing group or an editor, but we could manage without. And we can find the work of writing very personally satisfying. It can make a big difference to our own lives, to have done this work.

But the purpose of writing is in connection and communication. Without readers to receive your message, the creation is incomplete, unrealized. If you write a good book and no one reads it, does it truly fulfill its purpose? Somehow I don't think so.* One might point to writers like Emily Dickinson, who received very little attention for her poems during her lifetime, as a contradiction to this argument. But if Dickinson's poems had stayed in a trunk and been lost to the world, that would have been a tragic loss, even though Dickinson's experience of creating the work would have been the same.

That's why I believe it's important for writers to seek ways of sharing their work when the time is right. It doesn't have to be a major book deal for a bestseller. Maybe you're photocopying a chapbook and passing it to friends, or reading at the local open mike, or serially blogging your novel. But don't do your work the dishonour of keeping it hidden when it is meant to be shared.

I was happy to discover that Patry Francis at Simply Wait agrees with me. Her post "On Writers and Ambition" sums it up.

Like most writers, I write because I'm mysteriously impelled to do so and have been since childhood. If I was never published anywhere, I would probably continue--simply because I have no idea how to stop. But writing only for myself has never been my goal. I write to share who I am and what I know, what I've seen and heard and felt; I write to resurrect the lost and to give flesh and voice to the ghosts who often take up residence in my study.

I also write with the hope of earning a living that will prevent me from ever having to hoist another waitress tray. Until the sale of my first novel last November, it looked like I might end up slinging hash until I drop. And really, I couldn't have complained. I was so obsessed with writing that I never consider another career. I tossed everything I had on the table; and if I lost, I could have blamed no one but myself.

I wonder how many Emily Dickinsons or Jane Austens we never read because they had no family to cossett them, no private wealth to nurture their dream, because their hours and days and lives were lost to the exigencies of making a living in factories and mines, in domestic service or on farms. Their stories remain untold, their novels and plays and poetry unwritten. By some accident of history, a few of us are getting a chance that our ancestors could never have imagined. Only base ingratitude could prevent us from making the most of it.

Preach it, sister.

*If you write a bad book, its purpose might be just for practice :-)