Mr Mybug will not die...
There is some guy on Twitter laying down The Rules on How To Be A Real Writer (it was all about SUFFERING FOR ONE'S ART) - and I will confess, I have never heard of him or anything that he has writ, okay, I am An Old and maybe he is a name to conjure with among a younger generation than my own -
- however, the extent to which he is getting his head handed to him in the twitterverse, I suspect not, he seems to be entirely doing that thing of claiming an authority he doesn't have the funds to cover.
And I feel that his late C16th equivalent was saying that no-one could be a Real Writer without they had gone to university and studied Latin and Greek and they were not eking a living holding horses outside a theatre, or as a rogue and vagabond player, or writing in that ephemeral and popular genre of plays, but composing the occasional sonnet while desultorily working on an epic.
And in the early C19th would have been snooting at 'only a novel'...
This sort of connects to a thought I was having the other day about the way certain writers and genres get sidelined and marginalised because, commercial and making a living.
Okay, Flaubert did a lot of woezering about his sufferings as an artiste: 'Flaubert was a tireless worker and often complained in his letters to friends about the strenuous nature of his work'. On the other hand, he was not short of money, at least until later in life when the family business got into difficulties, and we may suppose that he was not cooking his own dinner, etc, and maintained an LDR with his long-term mistress. He also had syphilis and possibly other venereal complaints (Sid says HAI!) which surely count as self-inflicted troubles. While he may have anguished over every word, sentence and paragraph he did not have to worry about a roof over his head and where the next meal was coming from, and could afford to make extensive travels.
But really, I think some people cannot disentangle the idea that there may be suffering in pursuit of the actual craft from the idea that SUFFERING generally is necessary to THE ART. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2967040.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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