The weeping willow has taken to screaming

[sovay]

An unexpected by-product of becoming an editor: a greater than usual disgust with my own work, because there is so much more bad writing of one kind or another in the world than I had even previously believed; I don't even have (even if I wanted) the latitude to be mediocre. And all the things I want most to write I don't think I have the intelligence to. I'm only high-concept when I dream. I go through this periodically, this burning despite for everything I write or think. I don't know if I come out of it a better writer or just lapse back into a kind of frustrated written-off complacency. I wrote poems last year I like better than poems from 2009. (I wrote some poems in 2009 I still don't hate.) I still can't know if that makes them good.

I didn't use to think I was ambitious. I just liked not to do things badly. I hate to be limited. Same old, same old. I saw Amadeus at the Old Vic when I was seventeen.

Anyway, on the brighter side, because there is also good writing in the world: Robin Robertson, "At Roane Head." Fucking best selkie poem I can remember reading. I'd buy the book for it. And someone is repainting Eurydike on the underground.

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Slush did that to me as well. It wasn't the bad. The truly awful, miserable and misbegotten was refreshing, and I love the man who had the stones to copy-paste Cormac McCarthy's The Road as an epic fantasy, because it was, for all its sins (flat out word-for-word plagiarism) not the grinding, kind of competent with some flaws, but nothing bright, nothing good, nothing true stuff that flowed into my queue, like... well, slush. Worse were the things that did have something going for them, a little piece of brilliance like a pretty stone on an otherwise cheap ring that occasionally turns into an angry spider and bites your finger.

And then you try to write. It's like being a dermatologist who has to go out in the evening and makes up their face in a magnifying mirror in a room with fluorescent lighting. Every pore is large enough to sink a well-placed putt.

Then there is the hell of seeing your influences abused by someone whose hands should be slapped away from those books until they develop sufficient mastery to deal with Ramona Quimby. Then you see the same influence in your own work and you want to tear it out and sew up the places where it came out and then burn the work and hide it somewhere.

You get low.

But trust in this: you have some things that the people in your slush pile have not, and those do make all the difference. You have a point of view, you have something to say. A few of those people will get that, too, someday, and stop depressing the hell out of their editors, some will be satisfied knowing they tried and some will be bitter... You know what, to each their own road, with my blessing, whatever it's worth. We won't talk about them.

I don't even have (even if I wanted) the latitude to be mediocre.

I won't say you don't have the capacity, because no one doesn't, but I have never witnessed you being mediocre, so I remain skeptical.

And all the things I want most to write I don't think I have the intelligence to.

Word. I mean, we do get better at this, if we try, but it's always the best ideas that are just out of reach, just another box or crate or step ladder on top of the creaky, swaying tower of ability, and such a risk of fucking up and losing that beautiful thing forever, or, worse having it come halfway down, and be all bruised and ruined when you bring it home (Sun Seed Sickle and Scythe for instance). There are so many cool stories that are well within my comfort level to do, and I like to think I would be a lot happier if I could just do those, but that's not how it seems to work.

I'm only high-concept when I dream.

I really wish I could say "fuck high concept" but I can't, because I secretly wish I could write high concept. Or just write something I understood before I wrote it.