madness of art

Funny how I (we?) go through cycles of extreme confidence and then insecurity on a basis so routine it’s both dreary and comforting.

I experience this specifically with writing. For example: I was on a kind of high heading back to Baltimore this October, feeling good about my writing projects and where I was in life—and then, possibly due to all the MFA talk about how hard it is to write, about how difficult it is to get recognition, about how scary it is to do this, I started feeling badly about my own work. This lasted for a fair while, even through a spate of good writing news. No need to get into it, except to say that my thoughts revolved around the doubt portion of that “Middle Years” saw: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

The slump was especially unnerving because I had just that fall resurfaced from a “feeling badly” period. My fixation that time was unoriginality, spawned by an incident from this summer. In essence: I wrote a story last year and modeled its structure on a piece I vividly recalled reading, but that I couldn’t find. We were often directed to other pieces for structuring aids (I believe Alice recommended Nabokov’s “Reunions” to every student in my graduating class), so I mapped out the story’s structure and saw how it fit with my piece, and then away I wrote.

Skip to months later: going through papers after moving to my new place, I found the story I had been looking for, reread it, and was shocked: the story was so similar to mine, right down to how the shape and nature of the flashbacks. This wouldn’t have unnerved me if a journal hadn’t accepted my story months earlier, and if the proofs weren’t at the printer that very moment. After days of tearing my hair out—am I such a fraud? Is this copyright infringement? Should I tell the journal to stop the presses??—friends talked me down from the hysterical ledge. Of course the truth is that the stories are different, and that my anxiety was spurned less by plagiarism concerns than by inquiries into the nature of creativity (and, of course, by dumb self-doubt). To what degree are the things we create “inspired” by other works? Are ideas only ever slight adjustments of other ideas? Are we bound to imitate the things we love? A friend once said that there are only seven basic stories that have ever been told, and that we simply tell them over and over. Is it just a matter of how we retell these same stories?

Ick, enough whining. We writer types are so sensitive! Well, I can’t say I’ll ever not worry about these things, but I do have good news to report (although, for many of you, this is not new news): I signed with an agent to represent my novel! Now I just have to finish the novel, and try not to worry myself into states again.

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