I've Never Related To The Work Geek

For Those Whose Ganglia Were Formed Pre-tv, The Mimetic Deployment Of Pop-culture Icons Seems At Best An Annoying Tic And At Worst A Dangerous Vapidity That Compromises Fiction's Seriousness By Dating It Out Of The Platonic Always, Where It Ought To Reside.

When The Civil Rights Battle Was Won, All The Jews And Hippies And Artists Were Middle Class White People And All The Blacks Were Still Poor. Materially, Not Much Changed.

Being Blocked, Being Uncertain, Sitting There Not Knowing, Waiting, Abiding With It: This Is The Work. If You Don't Have The Tolerance For That You're In Great Trouble. If You Want To Call It A Writer's Block... That Doesn't Seem A Very Useful Name For That Kind Of Abiding That I Think Is The Essence Of The Work.

So Much Of The Effort That Goes Into Writing Prose For Me Is About Making Sentences That Capture The Music That I'm Hearing In My Head. It Takes A Lot Of Work, Writing, Writing, And Rewriting To Get The Music Exactly The Way You Want It To Be.

Art Is About Eliminating Almost Everything In Order To Focus On The Thing That You Need To Talk About.