How would you rather be remembered?
Nov. 12th, 2019 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerOn Twitter the other week I posed the question:
The results were interesting. Sixty-one percent voted for a small body of all gems; thirty-nine percent for the larger mixed body. In hindsight, I should have phrased my question better (bad anthropologist; no biscuit), because people may have interpreted “amazing things” as being not the same thing as “gems,” which was how I intended it. But maybe not; it’s entirely possible people knew what I meant, and that’s just where their particular preferences lie.
Me, I’m on the side of “large mixed body.” Because here’s the thing: even a really amazing work isn’t going to speak to absolutely everybody, and even a less-than-perfect story can brighten someone‘s day. If I have a large body of work, there will probably be more people overall who really felt touched by something I wrote — even if discussions of my writing include people saying “yeah, but let’s just pretend X never happened.”
Plus — as several people pointed out in their responses on Twitter — we can’t really control what is and is not received as a classic or a groundbreaking work. We can try our best, but in the end, that judgment is in the hands of other people. We can’t fully control how much work we produce, either; factors like health, day jobs, family demands, and the like will also cut into that. But it’s more within our grasp than reception is. If you step up to the plate a bunch of times, you won’t hit a home run every time, but your odds having at least a few are better than if you only took half a dozen swings.
So I’d rather produce a lot of work, even if some of it is meh or even (in hindsight) a bit embarrassing. And maybe somewhere in that pile, I’ll manage a few gems.
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Date: 2019-11-12 08:50 pm (UTC)But also, I can't help thinking of it mainly from a writing perspective. It doesn't matter to me what people think of my work after I'm gone - I'll be dead! I assume I either won't care or I'll have bigger things to think about! - but I would far rather spend my life writing anything and everything that appeals to me than laboring away to perfect just a few works. But I'm wired that way. For someone who really enjoys crafting a work and honing and polishing it until it's as perfect as they can get it, then they ought to do that instead, and will probably turn out some very fine results. But I don't think I would enjoy that nearly as much.
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Date: 2019-11-13 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-13 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-13 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-13 11:55 am (UTC)So yeah, I'm also in boat that is a ship that has sailed with you--it's a good boat, at least we can share around snacks--but for me one of the questions was: can I think of an author where I think everything they wrote was a gem?
Maybe I'm just a picky horrible person, but I generally have more and less favorite works even of my very favorite authors. Some very few authors I can honestly say "I love everything [or almost everything] they've written," but "I love" and "it is honestly great" are not the same thing.
I was one of the people on twitter who answered "I don't control that," and I think Sholio has a very good point above that I am having a much better time writing things--and the process of revising them professionally and talking to readers about them is teaching me more than throwing them in a drawer or deleting them would. But the more I think about it, the more I think that "every work a gem" would have required an actual worldview shift for me.
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Date: 2019-11-14 07:49 am (UTC)On Twitter the exemplars someone used for the two modes were Peter S. Beagle and Harper Lee. The latter of whom has two novels now, I guess, but for fifty-five years had only the one, and even if it's not exactly my cuppa on an aesthetic level, everybody pretty much agrees that one book was an important classic. But once you're talking about somebody with more than, oh, three titles to their credit, it's rare-too-impossible for all of them to achieve that kind of status.
I'd rather have a dozen good-to-middling novels to my name than just one, however great. I mean, that might partly be because I can't truly conceive of anything I write being taught in tenth-grade English classes all over the country -- some levels of greatness are on another planet entirely from where I am -- but I wouldn't want to feel like I had only the one idea, y'know?
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Date: 2019-11-14 11:43 am (UTC)Could Harper Lee have done better if she'd kept writing. I don't know. I mean, the other part of it is, to some extent people are who they are with how much writing they do. Some people, when circumstances encourage them to write more more more, re-entrench their prior worldviews, others reach out for different angles and find they have more to say...or maybe those are the people who would have had more to say to begin with. Some have more to say already and it's just how to say it that's not there.
But to return to the question: I feel like the canon has not done very well at getting me the good books over the mediocre ones for the period it's supposed to cover. It was silent on some authors I adore and boosted some whose achievements are dubious. And that's true even if you shift to "sff canon" instead of "literary/English class canon." So even reframing "one work that goes in the canon vs. several that don't," my sympathies put me off to one side rather firmly.