photo credit: rougerouge

Note: Two posts in one day and they’re both writer talk! You’d think I’d be busy actually writing rather than crapping on endlessly about this stuff, gees.

As is the nature of the origin of most of my blog posts, I’ve been having a chat to a few people recently about the presence of ego in writing. While doing that, I googled around to see if anyone else had anything to say on the subject, and found this brilliant page containing a short statement by Robert Anton Wilson. If you don’t like clicking links, the main point is summed up in the notion that in order to be a successful writer, you must necessarily believe that the things you have to say in your story are worth being heard. In a practical sense, you’ve got to think that the reader will put reading the words that you have printed on a page are more worthwhile than, say, going down to the shops or watching a film. Otherwise why would they ever read you?

Of course it’s never as simple as that; people read other people’s words for all sorts of reasons. Escapism, distraction, pure boredom, to impress others, the list goes on. However I think the main thrust of the argument is pretty much spot on. Writers, and artists of all types, must believe that what they are producing is good. It’s the bedrock from which great ideas spring from. If you start off thinking that the idea for a story that occurred to you after witnessing a car accident isn’t really that crash hot (pun fully intended), then how the heck is anyone else going to think it is? Looking at it this way, it may seem like the egotism of writers and artists is almost a bluff, and to be honest I think I’d agree with that. My personal opinion is that art in itself is worthless. Some pretty colours or phrases on a convenient media. It only obtains true worth when we assign significance to it; a common feeling or interpretation that pushes the piece into the meta. In this environment, the bluff becomes the belief that the idea that you’ve produced is worth something before society has a chance to validate this belief (and with that, I’ve just pushed forward the idea that art must be validated by society, and fuck it, I’m not apologising for that).

Right, I’m becoming tangential. Back to the beginning, I wanted to pose the question to any and all artists that visit this site: do you believe that what you produce is good? If so, do you think that others would share that belief? In essence, do you have what Wilson believes is the necessary ego to become a successful artist? Do you agree that it is indeed necessary? Hit up the comments, they’re nicely threaded now and you can subscribe to them, so there’s no reason not to get involved!

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