recherche

Seeking the Interesting

A really, ahem, interesting post from one of Tumblr’s favourite writers, mills.

He writes:

We say: “I want to be a writer,” or “I want to be a photographer”; or we say: “I want to take interesting photographs,” or “I want to write interestingly,” or “I want to be interesting.” This is itself interesting. What do we really want when we want such things?

…

The beginning of creative efforts is always strange in this way: before we can express something, we must sense that there is something we should express, something not otherwise explored…

This pretty much sums up why I chose to pursue the book topic I’m currently pursuing. I never wanted - perhaps “don’t want” is a more accurate tense here - to be “the girl who wrote the sex book”, it just happens that sex was the arena in which I spotted a huge gap in the stories being told.

I could have just as easily chosen to write a book on “feminism” more generally, but there are books on feminism coming out all the time, and while I read them, most of them don’t tell me anything I don’t already know, as I allude to in this review. (There are books on sex coming out all the time too, but so far none have made the argument I want to make.) Linda Hirschman’s Get To Work is possibly the most recent exception to this trend, but again, that was on a very specific topic.

This doesn’t mean these books are without value - plenty of people haven’t heard their arguments before, and for those people, what I find ultimately “uninteresting” is thrilling.

Similarly, I could be writing about the internets, technology, identity - any of that other good stuff that thrills me - but again, a lot of people are already writing about that, and they’re probably doing it better than I could (comparative advantage, Zach might say). Really, it’s that - again - no obvious unsaid argument jumped out at me.

Mills’ post also reminded me of people who say they want to be writers, but also say they can’t think of anything to write about. This has confused me for some time because, for me, the desire to write stems from the desire to write about specific things, which would eat away at me if I didn’t type them out. This is particularly true of blogging - here or otherwise.

Professionally, ego comes into it more (someone remind me of that Stephen King quote on writers and narcissism? I can’t find it on Google, but I can guarantee it’s true) - I want to be the person getting that idea out there, I want people to be thrilled by my ideas - but again, it ultimately comes down to an excitement about a particular concept that I want to explore and get others to think about. Or best of all, respond to with thoughts of their own.

So, I’m a little cynical of people who say they want to “be writers”, but are stuck for something to actually write about.

But perhaps I’m being too cynical. Like Mills, I am also a novice photographer - much of the time a piss-poor one. I like to capture interesting or beautiful things on camera, but I also know that my photos are unlikely to be interesting to anyone else (unless they’re of my friends, who will enjoy looking at themselves and each other). And I don’t feel the same urge to take photos that I do to write.

Perhaps this inauthenticity - the urge to be good for the sake of being good, to be interesting for the sake of being interesting - is okay, though. As Mills writes:

It is more fun, more amusing, when one accepts the inauthenticity of oneself: a phony photographer trying to be interesting without any damn reason is more tolerable when he can laugh at himself, I hope; and the same should be true for a phony writer. It is all play, after all; perhaps, then, a disclaimer is in order: please know that the author of this site is comfortable with laughter.

What do you think? Why do you write? And why do you write what you write?