Larry M. Coleman

I’m currently reading Wallace Stevens’s The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. In it, he quotes the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni:

I have made the painful discovery that nobody loves and feels music.

Have you ever felt this way about what you’re writing (or want to write)? I hope so. If you’re not afraid of what others will think about it, then you don’t care about what you think about it.

Not everybody will love what you create, but “not everybody” is not the same as “nobody.” The most valuable lesson I’ve learned through doing a lot of formal writing workshops is:

1. There will always be someone who doesn’t get your work at all. It’s almost always only one person.
2. Everyone will have at least one thing about your work that they don’t get. The more obvious it is to you, the more certain it is to be one of these things.
3. People often like what you write more than you do.

Both of the first two are fine. Probably the only way to guarantee that you’ll please no one is to write to please everyone. Write what you have to say because if you don’t, you’ll never find out how true #3 is.

I love the humorist David Sedaris. In my opinion, he’s one of the funniest writers alive. That means there will be thousands (maybe millions?) of people who simply don’t get him. He’s extremely successful, yet he already had me laughing only two paragraphs into The Best of Me because I (and you) can so deeply identify with the feeling he has as a writer:

I’m not the sort of person who goes around feeling good about himself. I have my days, don’t get me wrong, but any confidence I possess, especially in regard to my writing, was planted and nurtured by someone else—first a teacher, then later an agent or editor. “Hey,” he or she would say, “this is pretty good.”

“Really?” This was my cheap way of getting them to say it again.

Someone will love and feel your art, even if there are times when you don’t. Put your work out to, as Stevens calls it, “a gallery of one’s own.” By making your art you make your gallery. People will visit that gallery and smile or laugh happily or derisively or shrug or go out with a different view of the world than they had when they walked through your thoughts. By making your gallery, you make your own people. You’ll find them by letting them find you.