I have written on this topic erenow, but it bears repeating.
A fine reader wrote it with a kind compliment. He was thanking me for his new scarf. He said I had dashed his hopes of being a writer by my undue excess of skill, that his writing was so inferior in comparison, so he had burned his computer, and now had free time to take up knitting.
I felt I had to write back. I know he was making a joke, but there was a serious point behind the joke, a willingness to surrender, which I hope, if I fed, I could also starve.
I know you mean it as a compliment, but my prose appeals, and is only meant to appeal, to a narrow audience.
If you are in that audience, I am very grateful.
But I will tell you my version of your story [about the scarf]. I was a bookish child, friendless, unhappy. In my youth, I read a book by David Lindsay.
If an adult read it, he would say that this book was written in an awkward, tin-eared fashion, with a main character who is a cipher without personality, on an adventure that makes no sense. There is no plot to the book: the hero travels through strange landscapes meeting stiff and highly symbolic figures, committing apparently pointless murders.
The book was not well regarded then or now. It sold less than 200 copies in its first printing. The writer Lindsay, who has been largely forgotten, died young in utter poverty of a disease caused by improper dentistry, that is, something that could have been easily prevented.
The book is A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS and it is one of the most important books in my life.
It shaped my youthful and hence my lifelong idea of what life was for and what reality was about.
It was magical to me, the very wine of the gods.
And yet, to everyone else, even perhaps to the man who wrote it, it is an incomprehensible, opaque, meandering, pointless book. In the eyes of the world, it is a worthless book.
Now, imagine that you are Lindsay and some child who will not be born for 40 years after your death is the only one who will read and understand and treasure your book — the book you think is lousy — is in my position.
Myself, I have more pity for that child, yet unborn, who will be your greatest fan, than I have for Lindsay, had he burned his computer, and decided not to write.
Do you understand? I cannot write the book that one child needs. You can.
And if there is more than one fan you can serve, all the better.
If you wish not to be a writer, then don’t write. If you wish to be a writer, don’t give up, don’t show weakness, and don’t compare yourself to other writers.
Writing is not like a beauty contest, with one winner, it is like a Shakespeare comedy, with five marriages at the end, and each swain swears his bride is his true love, for so she is.
Again, I thank you for the compliment. You do me honor I do not merit. But if you burn your computer, that means you do not understand the point of the four stories whose artistry you so admire.
No one in the Night Land burns his computer. They do not open the door and invite the dark things inside. They resist without hope. You, who have hope should not be less than they, even if you are saying it as a joke.
Who is going to write that terrible and untalented book for that unknown and unborn reader who will praise and remember it with lifelong gratitude if you do not?
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