A Pilgrim’s Digression

In my craft and sullen art

I have written here before that I began writing in the fifth grade. My teacher, Miss Minnick, made a standing assignment that we were to write a short story every week for presentation to the class.

I proved adept enough at it that I received not only good grades on my stories, but praise from her and from my classmates, a thing I was scarcely used to. Indeed this early praise was probably as dangerous as it was beneficial. It gave me an exaggerated sense of my own powers. Ever since, life has been working to steadily disillusion me of what I am capable of doing with words.

Another effect of that early experience has been a rather intense need for appreciation, particularly from women. Miss Minnick was a young, pretty teacher, and I was eager for her attention and love. I have recreated that first mentor/pupil relationship over and over throughout my life. It has been all-too-easy to replicate, since English teachers are almost invariably women.

However, as I have moved into adulthood, fiction writing has become as difficult for me as it was once easy and immediately gratifying. I am not speaking here of anything so vaguely Romantic as the departure of “inspiration.” I mean simply that although I have tried to deny it, have withdrawn more into myself, have sworn that I shall follow Dickinson’s example and select my own company and then shut the door, I cannot deny anymore that what I would really like is to have an audience again.

Writing this blog has provided that audience, and in some ways I have still been able to select my own company, even if I cannot shut the door. When I write here, the prose flows freely, without inhibition. I am gratified by near immediate responses (mostly by women). But can this become something more than just an on-line journaling space, another more inhibited version of the old-fashioned paper diary I keep? If there can be nothing more to it, I wonder if by blogging I am not detouring my energies down a dead end street.

I have devoted a considerable time writing for this space today, as I do on many weekdays. I also wrote a poem this evening, the merits of which I am doubtful. That amounts to quite a few words I have written in one day alone, so I hope it is all worth it.

I realize there is value in just creating for no purpose but one’s own pleasure, but for my part, my pleasure is derived from pleasuring you. It always has been so. I have just been slow to recognize it.

This blog provides me the public forum and the audience I seem to require for my own happy creative outbursts, but the format is restrictive. How do I harness the ease and pleasure with which I write here to some more lengthy writing project I might like to undertake?

I put the question to you for good reason. If my own line of thinking is correct, long gone is the era of the solitary author writing privately, keeping everything to herself, then finding a willing agent and publisher who can spring her work of genius upon an unsuspecting world, to critical acclaim and fortune. That is what I have been trying to do all these years anyway, and it has not worked for me. I need response; I feed upon it.

What I envision is something similar to what Dickens did by writing and publishng a novel in installments. However, the potential in modern technology is that one could conceivably not only write/publish much faster, but revise as reader input arrives in your inbox. The result would be a work that is ideally free (speaking strictly of economics there), organic in nature, the content of which is determined as much by reader response as by author intent.

Questions such a work would raise would be, can a single author be said to “own” such a work anymore? And would it make profit impossible? Is profit really all that desirable anyway? In some respects, these are legitimate questions to ask of any author, past or present. The first question is especially pertinent, or maybe impertinent, depending on your point of view.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we do live in President Bush’s “ownership society,” and I admit I am reluctant to give up the idea that it is ME creating this work and the work I produce is wholly MINE and you have only as much right to it as I say. I stick a Creative Commons License on these pages because I am afraid that what I “own” will be stolen. I may have to revisit my reasoning behind that License, especially since Copyright law already protects me whether I explicitly say so or not.

That is a digression, however. The big questions are, how to do it? Where to begin? And what would I be beginning, anyway? And do I leave you out of it, only to ask that you clap your hands or boo and hiss as I complete each part? I admit up front, I can take criticism from a man. I’ve been eating shit from men all my life. Men do that best of all, shoving shit down each other’s throats in the interest of breaking each other down. So I’ve learned, to a certain extent, how to choke it down when the criticism comes from men. I cannot take criticism from a woman, however. It kills me, a stab right to the heart.

So then, what about the risks of failure? I may never get off the ground with this, which would not be the first time for me. But in the past, my failures, my abortions I call them, have been private. That is true of most writers in the past, I think. It’s a strange dichotomy created by the out-moded method of traditional book publishing. We see only the finished product and believe it springs a-leaping with energy from the warm womb of its creator. We don’t see the many abortive attempts, the failures. Sometimes we can read about these in the biopgraphies, but most of us don’t read the biographies. All writing is a failure, to a greater or lesser extent. Perhaps if I can come to terms with that fact, I can get over my own fear of failure, or at least my fear of being ridiculed (by women) for my failure.

Rambling as my thoughts are, I feel as if I am converging on something tonight. I will sleep on it and see how things look tomorrow, in the broad daylight.