Friend writes: "Remind me hat the phase of writing nonfiction where you think everything is shit
and bears no similarity to what you had so beautifully in your mind is
not the end of the story?"
Current thinking: Kill your darlings, and then you get to kill the shit phase, too. It's
not the end of the story, but over the years I've come to believe you
can mostly excise it from the story. Now I just get a cold feeling
toward work that's not good or just ok -- mechanical, like it's
something that just has to be removed, not like it's my moral failing. I
think what a lot of people experience as artistic failing is really a
sense of moral failing, the idea that you have failed at beauty or its
equivalent, which is to say that you have failed at good, and therefore
you must be bad, and vain, to boot, for thinking you could be otherwise.
But such sentiments evaporate when you give up the romantic ideal of
art as good -- aka redemptive -- in the first place. And the idea that
it endures. It isn't, it doesn't, and thank God. It's just something we
do. Sometimes some other people get something out of it, for awhile, and
then something else happens.
