This week’s seminar was great! I loved that we got passionately engaged with the text. My “personal” project is at a critical stage (I’ll be done with the first draft hopefully at the end of next week), and due to what I am demanding of myself, I end up demanding that of the texts we read. If they don’t overcome my critical faculty (that part of my mind that scours my writing to make it as good as I can), then I end up saying of that text: this is crap! 

So, I criticized Diaz, holding him up to the standard that I hold myself to. During my time at Evergreen there’s always that opinion that surfaces, where someone will balk at artistic standards, saying “Everything is as good as everything else, who are we to judge?”

And who are we to judge? We are students, trying to get better as writers, or communicators, or storytellers, or filmmakers. If we say at the beginning: “There’s no right answer; everything is as good as everything else.” Where will we end up? Will we have learned anything? Will we be better off for spending 10 weeks on 10 films and 10 books?

I don’t think we would be.

So, I criticize. I spend my mornings writing, my afternoons reading, and my evenings feeling anxious–like I left something out, or did something wrong. It’s a version of hell, forcing myself to produce the best I possibly can. And when I encountered Diaz I felt like he wasn’t really trying. I felt like he had taken a bunch of elements that other writers have come up with and done much better (switches of perspective, magic realism, the informative footnote), and he superimposed these over a family drama with a backdrop of immigration and Caribbean politics–and then he called it good.

To me, it wasn’t good enough. And maybe that’s a better statement than simply saying “it’s crap!”

It’s not good enough… nothing is good enough! Every morning I reach into the page and try to make a mess that’s correctable in an interesting way. I record my writing and play it back to myself, to make sure every syllable, every word, every sentence is in the right place, that they all sound right, read right, make the right kind of sense. Nothing is good enough and it never will be, but every now and then there are these sentences or passages or scenes that stand apart from me and my anxiety and my ambition–and I feel: that’s the right one, the right way done, thanks God for distracting me enough to get that out.

Michelangelo said that genius is infinite patience. I think genius is a profound sensitivity wed to a profound sense of dissatisfaction. A sensitivity to what is there, in life, in people, in things–and a sense of dissatisfaction with how it’s already been thought about, recorded, edited, presented.

What pisses me off the most about works of art is when I get the sense that the writer is satisfied with himself, herself. There shouldn’t be any of that left over, by the time the work reaches its audience–all that ego and that limpness needs to be put in place–to serve the work–to add something new to the conversation of culture.

Words to live by: