The Solitary Creator

Issue 203

Lisbon 2017

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Regardless of your method, or even of your purpose, the writing of prose is always done alone. Even if you’re surrounded—in a café, around friends, next to a loud neighbor—the objective is to create tangible words on the page from the intangible thoughts inside your mind. Your sentences, whether artful or not, are the consequence of your internal, solitary capacity to express what’s most personal. Nobody else can articulate your memories and emotions and imagination. What’s needed, instead of help, is inwardness, a collapsing into the self, it is centripetal, implosive—it is a practice of introspection that just might uncover your most intimate sensations.

For the reader, too, the act is solitary, even though reading can come with an expansive feeling: unlike the inwardness that’s required to excavate the right words as a writer, reading seems to enlarge the world, it amplifies, because an expressive sentence enlivens, illuminates, vibrates, and it somehow, almost magically, prompts real sensations. The reader feels the writing experience in reverse, as the tangible symbols on the page transform into intangible thoughts inside the reader’s mind.

Thus we have a beautiful paradox: both the writer and reader engage in completely solitary acts, both concentrating, both creating, with the consequence our most intimate form of art.

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You can, of course, occasionally feel a painter’s spirit in a canvas, just as you can almost touch a musician’s spirit in a song. Good art, in a halfway decent description, always conveys something essential about its creator. If you want to hide your feelings, don’t become an artist, or at least don’t become a good artist. Because you can’t really create anything profound without unearthing what’s deep within you, which means that all art that’s created with passion resembles exhibitionism, and all art that’s experienced with passion resembles voyeurism. Yet there’s nothing else in art that approaches the intimacy between writer and reader. The thoughts, in writing, are proscribed, managed, with writer and reader resembling puppeteer and marionette. Only the writer, of all artists, can compel a precise sequence of thoughts, it is an art where there’s control over the type and manner and even velocity of thought, where the writer directs, with subtly and precision, what comes next, but it is also where the reader, in fact, consents to be a hostage.

So it is no surprise when readers demand good writers. Reading words that you find disagreeable, line after line, can feel worse than simply listening to disagreeable speech. Listening to tedious speech isn’t exactly a joyful experience, but having words structure your thoughts in a text, having them shape your mind while you read sentences, is a bit like being forced to join a chant. For the reader, time is short, life already comes with enough nonsense, so there’s no point in wasting time on such disagreeable words. Besides, there are plenty of unimportant and inelegant people in life—why waste time with unimportant and inelegant writers?

By the same principle, however, it is certainly reasonable for writers to demand good readers. To be disliked for your opinions is perfectly fine, to be detested for your tastes isn’t that much worse, but there’s nothing more maddening, alas, than being misunderstood. The only feeling worse than an argument about your thoughts is an argument that misrepresents your thoughts. Whenever someone hurdles past your point, makes assumptions, and argues with a fictional version of you, it feels a bit like being accused of a crime that you didn’t commit—and that unjust sensation is simply magnified when it comes to prose.

If I go to the symphony, my enjoyment isn’t limited because I can’t play the violin, yet that’s not remotely true when I pick up a novel: I must have a nuanced understanding of vocabulary and structure and context and psychology and history and sentence-by-sentence create the narrative inside my mind. It is rather easy to overlook how much comprehending squiggles on a page is, in evolutionary terms, a recent innovation. If I’m inept, misguided, distracted, dense, confused, even just hungry, I’ll end up reading one sentence when another was intended, which is almost certainly, for nearly everyone, a common occurrence.

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Although it is easy to forget, there is a recognition that conversation is tricky, that people misspeak and misinterpret, that what’s intended is pretty much never what’s received. To look at the objective world is to create a subjective experience. Every glance around a room ends up filtered through childhood experiences and emotional states, yet we don’t typically make the same assumptions when it comes to reading, even though it is just as true.

Before long, while you attempt to sort out the madness, you start to wonder whether there’s a greater or equal amount of confusion in the contemporary world. Are we witnessing a rise in misunderstandings? Even more erroneous conclusions based on language mistakes? Or are we simply more aware of an ever-present human difficulty? When I order coffee but receive tea, attempt to read the newspaper but stumble from incoherence, or try to decipher the indecipherable directions for something supposedly simple, is it no different than the experience of a baffled, misunderstood ancient nomad? This latter option is the better choice if we want to be optimists.

But if I try to be a little humble—which I typically do my best to avoid—I start to wonder about what I might be missing, about the assumptions that I’ve hurdled past, about how much I, too, have missed context or misconstrued language or heard the wrong words, about all the times that I’ve fallen short of the truth yet still don’t know it in this moment. I’m perfectly content with the idea that people don’t understand me, but the idea that I don’t understand other people, that I’m misreading them, that is something that, well, I can’t always accept.