The unmoored, uncertain life of the artist

The uncertainty and unpredictability in the life of the writer and artist is universal and perennial. Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

"In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me."

Comparison and self-doubt are the thief of creativity

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that "comparison is the thief of joy." Comparison is also the thief of production and creativity. It is deadly and antithetical to the artist, the creator and the creative process. Philip Larkin said to the Paris Review:

"Everyone envies everyone else."

He also wrote a poem, 'On Being Twenty-Six':

"I feared these present years, 
The middle twenties, 
When deftness disappears, 
And each event is 
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt, 
And turned to drought."

Quentin Blake said: "As soon as I knew something was intended for print, I tightened up."

Hitchens wrote, embrace the doubt and comparison:

"The main thing as I keep saying, I never tire of saying is, to keep testing yourself against other writers who are better than you. That’s what qualifies one as a writer I think, permanently running the risk of having to say I don’t know why I bother."

He elaborated on this:

"[With George Orwell] you don’t get the sense for example when you’re reading Proust or Nebokhov or George Eliot that you shouldn’t be in the writing business."

Will Self - Art is theft, Ctd

Kingsley Amis by Anglo-Polish impressionist painter Feliks Topolski

Will Self (@wself) said during a panel conversation on Dubliners by James Joyce:

"Being pray to the anxiety of influence - and if any writer tells you that she or he doesn’t suffer from the anxiety of influence then they’re a stone-cold liar."

He explained how W.H. Auden notoriously used to write "GETS" in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal":

"W.H. Auden notoriously used to write in the marginalia "GETS", in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal". So I most re-read James Joyce’s Dubliners to steal stuff."

Will Self also explained that he likes to think he's a good enough writer to thieve. He said in the Guardian:

Eventually the relationship between words and money will be reconfigured, Ctd

Libby Purves wrote in The Times here:

"We are living through a technology-driven hiccup in which this obvious truth is blurred, as an online generation grows up with the erroneous belief that music, films, streamed TV and news should be as free as air and sunshine. Ironically, this same generation includes an unprecedentedly large proportion who fancy media careers. What do they plan to live on? 

My theory is that by 2020 robust online paywalls will be the norm (probably with micropayments per view) and people will look back at us wonderingly, as we now look back at slavery or the days before driving tests. 

National papers are commercial enterprises with proprietors and shareholders. They can each work out their own destiny, whether by erecting paywalls or through aggressive advertising and data-mining."

Will Self spoke to the same effect on Radio 4 here when he said that, "eventually the relationship between words and money will be reconfigured."

Will Self - "Eventually the relationship between words and money will be reconfigured, I can be sure of that."

Robert McCrum recently ran a series on Radio 4, 'Sins of Literature' and in the episode, 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' discussed with Will Self the very pressing, monetisation of words question. Will Self explained his position on the matter:

"I personally feel that the big impact of electronic reproduction and dissemination on print has got a long way to go yet. You talk to people in the industry and they seem to my way of thinking, bizarrely calm. They seem to be like people in the phoney war in 1939/40. They don't seem to have quite realised what very possible will happen. They don't seem to see an equivalence between the music industry and print; whereas I certainly do. And they don't even seem to see an equivalence between news print and book print, but I think there certainly is. That yes we're in the interregnum between the print era and something else and I think the publishing field have yet to really understand that there will necessarily be a period between which the relationship between words and money is going to become very problematic and tenuous." 

Presenter Robert McCrum then said: "That's the key: until we work out how to monetise that relationship, we're going to be in this limbo." Will Self responded bullishly, saying:

"Eventually it [the relationship between words and money] will be reconfigured, I can be sure of that." 

Writing on paper, Ctd Will Self and writing on a typewriter

In an interview with The White Review, Will Self explained how he writes:

"I’d write on screen, print it out, correct the type, rekey it, and then do it again after that. I was primarily writing on a word processor but then bigger, faster computers came in, the internet arrived in about 1995-96, and I began to get slightly technophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the technology much having been quite enthusiastic when I was running this business and adopting all of these machines. I didn’t go completely luddite for a while though. Dr Mukti was the first book I wrote on a typewriter in around 2003. I’ve written all of my books since on a manual typewriter."

In November 2012 the Times of London did a feature with Will Self that followed the closure of Britain's last ever typewriter retailer, Brother. Will Self said:

"I switched to working on a manual typewriter in 2004 (all my previous books had been composed either on an Amstrad word processor or more sophisticated computers), because I could see which way the electronic wind was blowing: dial-up internet connections were being replaced by wireless broadband, and it was becoming possible to find yourself seriously distracted by the to and fro between e-mail, web surfing, buying reindeer-hide oven gloves you really didn’t need — or possibly even looking at films of people doing obscene things with reindeer-hide oven gloves. The polymorphous perversity of the burgeoning web world, as a creator of fictions, seriously worried me — I could see it becoming the most monstrous displacement activity of all time.