Is Writing Still Important?

I recently attended a writers conference. It was my first: interesting and predictable, enjoyable and painful, for reasons having less to do with the event than with my feelings about writing, publishing, success, failure, and the place of writing in today's world.

For years I avoided writers conferences because they sounded like an oxymoron. Writers are solitary by nature or constraint. It is an internal conversation with an imaginary audience, with characters, voices in one's head. Solitude is the fourth wall, the amniotic membrane protecting the internal conversation from external noise. I can write in any environment, even a bus station, because I can be alone anywhere and move in my own silence. But to be congregated with other writers, as if we are all siblings in a trade union, seems strained. Of course, others do not agree with me.

One speaker, an earnest thriller writer, claimed that writers who stay to themselves are condemned to breathe their own air, whereas writers who attend conferences and read writing magazines imbibe fresher air from a larger supply. This is an invidious metaphor, and opposite from the truth. For a writer must foremost be original, always listening to his own mind and heart. When writers congregate, others' opinions can permeate our osmotic brains. Suddenly, unwittingly my great new idea is really someone else's great old idea. Originality is the only gift each of us has and it is hard to develop and to preserve. Mingling does not make this easier.

Aside from the inherent paradox of a writer's conference, I am ambivalent about agents, publishers and the publishing process. This business is less about books than about other things, social, political, for which I have limited interest, ability and time. When I decided to be a writer, I resolved to do so in good faith, to write constantly, truthfully and well about subjects important to me. I vowed to write out of my natural inclinations, and not like a skeet shooter, aiming at a target. Why bother to write something I didn't care about? There is too much refuse in too many landfills and there are too many trees being felled to write useless books.

I have done my part. I have written novels, short stories, essays, poems, articles, screenplays, and some radio plays, and would submit anything I have done with pride to anyone. Because I did the work, the thinking, writing, and revising. I know what went into everything I have done.
To express the foregoing thoughts at a writer's conference would be heresy. People who attend them may secretly believe them, but they are also crying out for a pay-off, the validation, adulation, even money that prompted them to make the sacrifices which writing categorically demands. To voice the opinion that marketing is secondary cause people to wonder why I bothered to attend.

No doubt, publishing is about marketing, about selling books as if they were tires or baby bottles. But is this appropriate? I studied English and American literature for my BA and MA and also taught it, so I still have a perhaps antiquated and romantic view that literature should do more than give people what they expect. A woman I know brought in several best-sellers of the last decade. She announced that she would throw them out if nobody took them off her hands. When I asked her what one of the books was about she could not recall. Her reaction was, “Oh, it was some trashy thing I read at the beach.” This was a best-seller, the pinnacle of success, what most writers aspire to. Yet, even the most valued writing had little value to a reader who went to a book store and paid $25 per book. So why did I bother to write?

The answer to that question is easy. Each writer must have his own reason to write, must find the meaning in it, and write out of that core.

Marketing is about who the writer is, not what he has written. It is about “credentials”, or “platform”…what right do you, the writer, have to be writing a book and why should anyone read it? That question is irrelevant and any answer, speculative. The proof of the value of a book is in the reading. And anyone who reads my work will understand its value.

It may sound arrogant, but it is the healthy arrogance any writer of conviction must have–and has probably earned.