"Writers feel a lot of shame..."
Tonight in class one of my fellow grad students said this:
"Writers feel a lot of shame in the egomania that's involved in writing...it makes them focus on their failures."
I found that interesting, and it spoke to a lot of what I feel when I'm writing, and probably part of the reason every blog I've ever started gets abandoned. It also reminded me of something I tweeted three days before:
"Artists of all kinds find themselves in a dilemma characterized by the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found."
(From "When We're Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work of Eileen Miles," Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson.)
Agreed. I constantly feel a need to hide - even making my Twitter public has been an agonizing dilemma for me. It's much safer to keep one's thoughts within - there's no criticism, no opportunity to be misunderstood or disliked - or perhaps worse, ignored. Pretty much the last thing I would want is to have a public persona. But then there's also this need to share what I see and think. It's a conundrum.
"Writers feel a lot of shame in the egomania that's involved in writing...it makes them focus on their failures."
I found that interesting, and it spoke to a lot of what I feel when I'm writing, and probably part of the reason every blog I've ever started gets abandoned. It also reminded me of something I tweeted three days before:
"Artists of all kinds find themselves in a dilemma characterized by the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found."
(From "When We're Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work of Eileen Miles," Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson.)
Agreed. I constantly feel a need to hide - even making my Twitter public has been an agonizing dilemma for me. It's much safer to keep one's thoughts within - there's no criticism, no opportunity to be misunderstood or disliked - or perhaps worse, ignored. Pretty much the last thing I would want is to have a public persona. But then there's also this need to share what I see and think. It's a conundrum.