The writing life is filled with satisfaction and pitfalls, success and failure, public and private scrutiny, the contemplation of considered thought and research as well as the writer’s conviction expressed in the word itself. Every writer has critics and advocates and learns to pay attention to both in equal measure without melting before the ardor of either criticism or praise. Both enthusiasts and detractors raise temperatures and, as one of my favorite American politicians Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Writing is a private, solitary endeavor first (and, perhaps, foremost) and only if/when it gets published or read to an audience of one or more does it become public. It seems likely that far more writing is seen only by its author than makes its way to a larger audience, whether in a weekly newspaper, a national magazine or a best seller list. Either way its value, utility and intellectual/emotional nutrition are in the eye of the beholder, including but not limited to that of the author.
Wallace Stegner, in my view one of America’s finest writers, wrote (in a work of fiction): “Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.”
The commission is assumed to be valid for the writer unless its source flows from outside pressures, in which case what Stegner refers to as “the gift” is not its own justification. It is just another hired gun in the service of the highest bidder. That is not “writing” in the sense indicated here as what Stegner terms a “gift” to the community, but, rather, is closer aligned with advertising, public relations, political campaigning or promoting a particular religious/social/economic dogma. The gift is organic (even wild) and in all ways nutritious to human thought and discourse, sustainable in the world community and beneficial to that world’s mental/emotional/physical environment. Outside pressures genetically modify some writing and spray poisonous pesticides upon the writer’s imagination and integrity. And they are seldom labeled. While that is, in my view, unfortunate for writer, reader and the larger community, both writer and reader have choices in what to write and read and why, and those choices affect the larger community. In all things it’s worth the time and effort to discern what is organic and what genetically modified.
Whether it’s nourishment for the mind, the emotions, the body or the environment, organic, to quote Ernest Hemingway, is the just right word.