Early in my career I was influenced by three writers whose gigantic egos were widely misread: William Saroyan, E. E. Cummings and Norman Mailer. What seemed to be "ego," I later realized, was really a profound confidence in one's work, not because it was "better" than everyone else's but because it was successful as expression of a personal vision of existence.
This confidence was most directly expressed in self-interviews by Saroyan and Cummings and in the author's commentary in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, an early collection of his writing. The self-interviews especially interested me because such a "genre" had never occurred to me before. Later in my career I did the same thing myself. I might do it again soon. If nothing else, they are great fun to write.
Confidence is hard to come by early on because there is no concrete reason to have it. It's a leap of faith. I was fortunate to have early success with "Roll of Honor" stories in the Best American Short Stories collection (three times), which was national validation that I was, in fact, "a writer." Validation is exactly what young writers need. They crave to be taken seriously. As "writers."
Confidence has a dark side. I have had writer friends who had confidence far beyond their talent and their accomplishments. They were blind to their faults. To a degree, maybe all writers are, but the best tool a young writer can develop is a critical eye on his own work, finally becoming one's own toughest critic. But this, too, can go too far, so far that it paralyzes work because a draft is not "good enough." I've known writers like this as well.
One needs to locate one's place in the literary landscape. This done, I was able to have confidence in my achievements and also be aware of my neighboring heroes, the writers I looked up to. The first keeps the work flowing, the second keeps one humble.
My best students have not gone on to become writers. They couldn't hang in during the validation process, they were impatient, they found other ways to use their talents with quicker success and remuneration. As Paul Schrader said, "The only reason to be an artist is that you're incapable of being anything else."
This confidence was most directly expressed in self-interviews by Saroyan and Cummings and in the author's commentary in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, an early collection of his writing. The self-interviews especially interested me because such a "genre" had never occurred to me before. Later in my career I did the same thing myself. I might do it again soon. If nothing else, they are great fun to write.
Confidence is hard to come by early on because there is no concrete reason to have it. It's a leap of faith. I was fortunate to have early success with "Roll of Honor" stories in the Best American Short Stories collection (three times), which was national validation that I was, in fact, "a writer." Validation is exactly what young writers need. They crave to be taken seriously. As "writers."
Confidence has a dark side. I have had writer friends who had confidence far beyond their talent and their accomplishments. They were blind to their faults. To a degree, maybe all writers are, but the best tool a young writer can develop is a critical eye on his own work, finally becoming one's own toughest critic. But this, too, can go too far, so far that it paralyzes work because a draft is not "good enough." I've known writers like this as well.
One needs to locate one's place in the literary landscape. This done, I was able to have confidence in my achievements and also be aware of my neighboring heroes, the writers I looked up to. The first keeps the work flowing, the second keeps one humble.
My best students have not gone on to become writers. They couldn't hang in during the validation process, they were impatient, they found other ways to use their talents with quicker success and remuneration. As Paul Schrader said, "The only reason to be an artist is that you're incapable of being anything else."
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