It would, I believe, be disingenuous to hold a class without offering the unsuited persons in the assembly a chance to leave the room. To be a writer – that is, someone for whom writing is closer to being a aspect of being rather than a particular activity, demands certain distinctions.
There are many personal rewards available to the hobbyist of the creativity arts or humanities; they barely need to be emphasised and certainly should not be dismissed. Nevertheless a disservice – even unkindness – is shown to to those who are not informed as to the realities of being an artist, whatever the form. To patronise is a certain kind of assault, one which far too regularly exists within the arts. It threatens to not only humiliate and mislead, but interfere with the greater cultural process itself and participate in a pervasive and poisonous fraud. To be fair; it is probably a flaw of the English language which perpetuates the myths and misconceptions of art, artist and medium.
There is understandable reluctance in our times to so much as appear to uphold any kind of elitism. To draw a line between the hobbyist and (for want of a better term) ‘fine artist’ begs for accusations of pretentiousness, and to be clear, the distinction is not that of the amateur or professional: One of the current issues we must apprehend is the infiltration of the professional sphere by those incognisant of a writer’s duties. My view isn’t an elitist one; becoming a writer in my sense of it is not a reserved space – it simply (or not simply) demands deeper commitments than sitting down and typing.
John Fowles indicates something of the furious single-mindedness involved with this sort of being:
A publisher accepted The Collector in July 1962. I had been deliberately living in the wilderness; that is, doing work I could never really love, precisely because I was afraid that I might fall in love with my work and then forever afterwards be one of those sad, faded myriads among the intelligentsia who have always had vague literary ambitions but have never quite made it. I chose ten years ago to be a writer – chose in the existentialist sense of the act of choosing; that is, I have constantly had to renew the choice and to live in anguish because I so often doubted whether it was the right one. So I have turned down better jobs; I have staked everything on this one choice. Partly it had been a conscious existentialist choice, partly something in my blood, in the Cornish quarter of me, perhaps. I think, now, that even if the book had not been accepted, even if I should never have had any book accepted, I was right to live by such a choice. Because I am surrounded by people who have not chosen themselves, in this sense, but who have let themselves be chosen – by money, by status symbols, by jobs – and I don’t know which are sadder, those who know this or those who don’t. This is why I feel isolated from most people – just isolated, most of the time. Occasionally content to be so. […]
In the January of 1963 I decided to leave work. I can’t imagine myself as a professional writer. Writing has always been with me a semi-religious occupation, by which I certainly don’t mean I regard it with a pious awe, but rather that I can’t regard it simply as a craft, a job. I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill, and experience; with something from outside myself.
Inspiration, the muse experience, is like telepathy. Nowadays one hardly dares to say that inexplicable phenomena exist for fear of being kicked in the balls by the positivists and the behaviourists and the other hyperscientists. But there is a metatechnics that needs investigating.
I don’t think of myself as ‘giving up work to be a writer’. I’m giving up work to, at last, be.
To a career man, I suppose, the decision would seem lunatic; perhaps even courageous. But a bank vault is secure; an atomic shelter is secure; death is secure. Security is one of the prison walls of the affluent society; ever since the pax Romana, being safe has been an unhealthy mega-European obsession.
- John Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am (1964) in Wormholes (London: Random House, 1998) pp. 5-7.
Fowles suggests that being a writer is a reiterated choice; but if one cannot ‘be‘ without choosing it, is that any choice at all?