Let me tell you about two kinds of people. Both are fabulously intelligent, but limited at the same time. Let’s call them the gardener and the fire-starter.
The gardener is a genius. Just ask her. She has studied and studied and read and read and discussed and discussed with like-minded—but always less-informed—people until she has built up a beautiful body of rhetoric that destroys anyone’s counter-attacks. Discourse it ain’t. There’s no learning to be had, just the winning of arguments. The gardener is a sophist.
The gardener won’t talk about topics she hasn’t studied more than you. She’ll roll her eyes and yawns, because the topics of your expertise are beneath her. She doesn’t function all that well in regular society. Y’see, the gardener doesn’t finish anything, for there are risks to be taken and to risk is to flirt with failure, or at least anything but complete success. She can’t handle that, her reputation can’t handle that. So she instead fortifies herself in the glory of past deeds, she buttresses this fortress with admiring sycophants who feel smarter just by speaking to her. She talks a mean game but in the end she tills her little patch of land uselessly.
The fire-starter is more interesting, and he stresses me out. For him, purpose is everything. He is driven, revolutionary, brilliant, active. He is ever on the move, ever digesting information, drawing from it what he needs to fuel is never-ending attack on the norm. I respect the fire-starter much more than the gardener.
His scepticism, though, is his greatest strength and his fatal flaw. He’s a cynic. Nothing is good enough, nothing is to be credited. Everything must be attacked. Anything you love or enjoy must be subverted. The fire-starter sucks a lot of the joy out of life.
I’ve known many gardeners and fire-starters. They make us question ourselves because the gardener mocks you for risking and the fire-starter shames you for not risking enough.
If you consider yourself an intelligent person, other intelligent people will have influence upon your thinking. This is right and fair. But, my oh my, what good is there in being influenced by cynics? You enter a spiral of second-guessing and measuring-up and you fail yourself because you’re not true to yourself.
Purpose.
Why do we create?
When brainstorming this with other writers—those I work with or those I teach—we come up with lists. Entertainment, self-expression, to relieve stress, to make money, to describe the human condition, because I can’t paint, because it keeps me from killing all of you people . . . Lots of reasons, all sound, many clichéd.
And that’s okay.
But, as for purpose. In On Writing, Stephen King confessed that he’d spent a great deal of his early career feeling guilty about what he wrote, because it was popular horror fiction, it made him money, it wasn’t “literature.” I think there are a lot of writers who must feel the same way.
Critics abound in this world. It’s much easier to criticize than to create. You just have to sound smart, sound like you’re an expert on a topic, sound like you have a right to say what you’re saying, and then rip somebody’s work to shreds. It’s much easier than hanging yourself out there and exposing a sliver of your soul, hoping that someone will look at it, interact with it, admire its beauty. Critics, in their jealousy, need to trash you because in doing that they can bring you down to their own level, the level at which one cannot create, only dissect.
I admire Stephen King because there’s a writer who has made it in popular fiction. Do anything popular and people will find a way to vandalize your reputation, because appealing to the masses means sacrificing your integrity. But King has never compromised—he’s not writing for the lowest common denominator, he’s writing for himself.
And the ability to ignore the gardener and the fire-starter is an admirable one indeed.
Harsh...
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