One Smart Bitch

If you get me started on Laura Kinsale, I'll bore you.

I'll tell you about how she should be widely acclaimed as a writer, instead of well-known only within her own genre. I'll tell you how fascinating it is that someone who started her career in geology ended up so gifted in the art of literature. I'll tell you how her acknowledged period of writers' block, brought on by an industry flogging her into production, is a cautionary tale for all aspiring writers, including myself.

She has written a great post on Smart Bitches about the relationship between writer and reader. It's started a lively (though smart and respectful, so not painful to read) debate in the comments thread. Basically, Kinsale maintains that writing is a solo act, one that even the writer is rarely in control of, and one that essentially does not contain readers in the equation:

A book is a magic thing. It has a life of its own. Do you doubt it, in the small hours of the night when you sit up in bed reading and reading, living in a world you never made, unable to bear to leave it until the last page closes and it vanishes into thin air?

And:

It’s not out there. It’s in here [...] I serve a different master. I serve this art, whether you buy it or not. I began to write because I loved to write. That is still the only way.

Even when she's blogging, she's a better writer than most of us.

There are a good number of people, both readers and writers, who disagree. Publishing, they say, is part of this equation. Reaching readers is part of the equation. There is no point to writing if no one ever reads it. That's their opinion, and that's just fine, but I couldn't, couldn't disagree more.

Great books are written when the author doesn't give a shit. Great books are written when all the crap is stripped away and the writer is sitting alone, pen in hand, confronting her humanity like thousands of writers before her, the same pose that Virginia Woolf sat in and Jane Austen sat in and Anne Frank sat in. Every one of them sat down to a blank page because they were compelled, and for no other reason. Woolf could have written capers if she wanted to be rich. Austen could have written potboilers. Frank did not have to write anything at all. Every one of them wrote because they had to, because these words and no others came to them, demanding release.

Incredibly, there are people in the comments debating whether books are art. Who are they kidding? If we're generous, given his times, Homer lived to be maybe 40. We have been reading his work for centuries. Longer even than he could have imagined in his wildest, wildest dreams. It is art, folks. It is bigger than you, than me. Yes, lots of fiction is entertainment. Lots of fiction is also art.

Kinsale has the last word:

Every single book that ever really rocked the market was something new and strange and wonderful and individual. Maybe it was simple, even clunky in execution, but there was something in it and about that that sang so loud everybody could hear it for miles. Knock-offs don’t sing that kind of solo. Knock-offs sing the background chorus. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when it’s all background chorus, then “the market” starts complaining about how blah and pedestrian and boring it all is. And they wait…

What they wait for is the art, and unless one of them happens to sit down and start writing it themselves, which has happened many and many a time, then they just have to wait. That’s why it’s not a service industry. ;) Readers don’t control it. Writers don’t control it. It’s not in service to anybody. We are in service to it.

It comes or it doesn’t.

Happy reading.

Abby