I’m not going to do what I did before. I won’t try to preemptively derive meaning or purpose from whatever I’m writing about. I’m just going to start over.
A few weeks ago I began reading Edith Wharton’s book on craft, The Writing of Fiction. The following quote, which appears early on in the book, gave me pause:
The answer is that he [the writer] will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it. As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.
There are two big points being made in this excerpt. One is about the conditions required for a writer to “do their best.” The other point, presented almost as an aside—as if this topic is more self-evident than is usually suggested—is about “experience.” In this context, experience is related to the ideas a writer is capable of writing about.
In this post, I’ll focus on the first point.
The beginning of the sentence seems very true from what I’ve learned in my own practice. A writer can’t write their best work until they stop considering everybody else’s opinion. The interesting part is who Wharton thinks the writer ought to be considering:
...that other self with whom the creative artist is always in correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him…
This reminded me of a concept I’ve heard before; the idea that artists may not be working for “their moment.” Their true audience may exist in another time or in another part of the world. I’ve seen this used most consistently as a way to offer people some perspective about their art-making (especially if they feel underappreciated). In general, an artist should take a long view, and not worry about contemporary reception. They are working toward something much bigger than that. The work is for the benefit of future generations.
But this sentiment never encouraged me much. No goals of posterity ever have. When I face an obstacle in my writing, I un-stuck myself by deciding that my work doesn’t need to be anything. By allowing it to exist only in the moment, I free myself to write whatever I need to say.
Stop. Here is where my first attempt at this essay started breaking down. I tried to make an argument about posterity, and why people might not be motivated by a future reader living somewhere or in some time unknown. I wanted to talk about process. But then I read the quote again. And I realized something was wrong.
My initial impression critiqued the concept that Wharton’s quote reminded me of, not what Wharton actually said:
...that other self with whom the creative artist is always in correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him…
This sentence isn’t about posterity at all. It’s about communication. The artist is not just creating for an “audience,” regardless of the time or place in which that audience lives. They are creating for an other self, but not in abstract terms. This other self is a real person with an objective existence.
So the idea is about communication and something else. Something like solidarity? Other real people out there can be imagined as our selves, and we are always exchanging ideas with them. We create and release things to be found eventually by other selves. Wharton doesn’t need to complete the concept for her purposes, but reciprocity is implied: we also receive things, all the time, from other selves.
And the sentence ends with this final condition:
...that other self with whom the creative artist is always in correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.
With this last piece, the word “audience” is more than just a little wrong, it’s utterly incorrect. No wonder hope for posterity isn’t inspiring. It’s not the point. Hope is required, but it’s a more profound kind of hope than even the inevitable future asks of us. You have to hope the message will reach its recipient—while knowing that you will never know if it does.
What have I learned about writing an essay so far?
Here’s what happened. I almost tried to write an essay by imposing a topic I wanted to write about (process and the temporality of creating something) onto an interesting quote I’d discovered in a book. Instead, I backtracked and allowed the writing to evolve out of the quote itself. I didn’t know what I was going to write about until I discovered the ideas through the act of writing. This process more closely mirrors how I write fiction. When writing fiction, I do a first draft with whatever is there in the moment. Only by going back over the words written do I find out what the novel or story is about. Then, a rewrite begins with everything new I’ve learned. A more substantial essay would begin here.
Now that I’ve reached the end of this writing, it seems… obvious? I almost don’t even want to post it because it feels that basic. But this is the whole point of Escape Velocity, so here’s the post anyway!