(Note: this is a long one.)

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

I don’t aspire to write great literature. All I want is to create characters and situations that entertain me first, and then a wider audience. I do aspire to the condition of art.

Recently I’d been stuck on a question familiar to many writers: what’s the point? I’ve been writing seriously for a couple decades now. I’ve had some success: short stories in literary magazines and anthologies, representation from literary agents, and I’ve developed some genuine skills when it comes to craft (although the cliché is true: the more I learn, the less I know).

But then?

Bloodless. Lifeless. Pointless. These words described my state of mind. Maybe not just writing, but I’ll stick to this topic.

How did I get there?

My first novel taught me how not to write a novel. My second was a suspense novel that flirted with the supernatural. I learned to put my main character through hell, and I learned I preferred speculative fiction. I got my first agent with that novel. She was a new agent, I was a new writer, so I figured why not? Nothing came of it. Last I checked she only represents nonfiction.

For my third novel, a multi-generational ghost story, I used as my characters and setting American soldiers stationed in Germany (I’d been there myself in that circumstance, and I’d seen very little art that reflects the weirdness and uniqueness of that situation). I didn’t get an agent. Too unclassifiable (too early for the market), so I self published. I sold a couple thousand copies, but realized I’m not a natural marketer. I still adore that book.

My fourth book is where things took a bizarre turn. This was at the beginning of the YA craze, and I had an idea about a murdered teen resurrected as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It practically wrote itself. I got my second agent at a conference, and silly me, I thought that meant I was guaranteed to get published. Here’s a secret: getting an agent only means you have an agent. It does not equal the promise or probability of a book deal.

He had good feedback but was hellishly slow to respond to my emails. He hit up all the big editors. No dice. Meanwhile I told him about my next book, a story of possession set in an alternate future where the Nazis won. I finished that book and sent it to him a week before my father was killed in a plane crash. I pushed the book out of my mind for a couple months until I realized the agent never acknowledged receiving my book. I let him know what had happened with my father’s death and asked him to respond. He told me he’d been too depressed by the election to work for a couple months. His response pissed me off royally. I forget what I wrote back, but a few weeks later he returned a terse rejection of that book.

Two agents down. One to go.

I poured all my energy into my next book, a YA about a runaway monster fighter sent to a sadistic reform school. By this point, the YA market had shifted to stories by women with female protagonists, or books about social issues. I went to a conference to pitch agents, and nine months later one of those agents reached out. We talked, and he signed me on. By this time I’d pretty much accepted that my male protagonist YA book had almost no chance of getting picked up. Instead I focused on the next novel, an adult fantasy set in a modern-day Arthurian world. My agent shopped it around, and except for one editor who couldn’t get his bosses to sign on to it, nothing.

Then Covid hit.

A lot of people felt creatively sidelined. Not me. I caught Covid at the beginning of lockdown and recovered quickly. With no social life, I knocked out an adult version of my monster hunter story. I sent it to my agent, who said he looked forward to reading it. I sat tight for a few months and then touched base. A couple emails later he told me he was swamped but would prioritize my book. I began my next book, a space opera. A few months later I reached out again. Two emails later he responded with much of the same. I made it clear that if he wasn’t interested in my book—or me—I’d understand. He assured me that wasn’t the case. A few more months, nothing. By then I’d finished the first draft of my next book and my feelings on publishing and writing were beginning to sour.

Then my agent sent me an email. He was leaving the publishing industry. Honestly it was a relief. I no longer had an agent but I had finality.

So that was where I found myself. Since then I’d written some short pieces but the passion was gone. The industry side ground me down. (This isn’t a rant against literary agents or publishing. I get that it’s not personal.)

How could I rediscover that passion?

I found the answer in a piece written more than a century ago.

I go hot and cold on newer fiction. I really want to read something modern and amazing but most often I’m disappointed by the utter sameness of it all. How many books do we need where the spunky heroine claims her mystical birthright? How many sci-fi stories have to feature a discovery that will change humanity forever?

So I revert to old dead writers, one of them being Joseph Conrad. He held up a mirror up to the darkness of his world and didn’t flinch. He was an artist.

I picked up a collection of his works and the first story (I can’t write the full title due to the specific sensitivities of these times but it ends with Narcissus) contains a preface. Written in 1897, it’s Conrad’s declaration that writing, and art itself, should aspire to reveal some truth of the world.

He opens with an explanation of what art is: …an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows what is enduring and essential. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of being.

He notes how an artist works versus a thinker or scientist.

…the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, finds the form of his appeal.

Not appeal as in what’s appealing, but appeal as in what the artist can use to make his case to the world.

The artist appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

Next Conrad turns to fiction. How does fiction ascend to art? By seeing it all around us.

…there is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity…

Writers can find wonder and pity everywhere. A protagonist who is flat is evidence of the writer’s failure. Every person, real (or imaginary) has the capacity for heroism or villainy. Every soul has something unique to share with the world.

How does fiction work its magic?

Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. It endows passing events with meaning, and creates the moral and emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses. It cannot be made any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion.

That last bit hits on something I’ve had a hard time articulating. I’m seeing more and more books and movies that preach a moral lesson. Art that does so is not art. It’s a sermon. It’s a polemic. Even worse, it’s a perversion of art. It’s a wolf in sheep skin looking for more sheep to eat. The age we live demands that art preaches moral lessons. There’s no attempt at persuasion. There’s no effort to reveal universal truths. This “art” won’t stand the test of time.

Next, Conrad shines the light on the writer. Any writer who has struggled can relate to this:

The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness, or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose.

Read that again, especially the portion that says, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him. The other day I was doing bench presses. I’d lowered the bar to my chest and my muscles refused to raise it one more time. I’d hit muscle failure. Conrad hit muscle failure, too. Instead of wallowing, he turns his attention to what HE wants from his writing.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel…to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

In that brief passage he focuses on the role of the writer: to make people feel and see the orld by illuminating it intensely. Even Conrad admits that’s easier said than done. In a later passage he describes the lost writer.

…all of these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him—even on the very threshold of the temple—to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude, the supreme cry of Art for Art itself loses the exciting ring of its apparent immortality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times faintly encouraging.

This next passage blew me away. Conrad is one of the more important writers of the modern era. By most measures he’s a success. But this dude from a century ago struggled. He knew doubt.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. Doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim—the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult—obscured by mists; it is not the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

In other words, writers choose a difficult road. Writers, unlike scientists, won’t ever get certainty they’ve reached their destination.

His last paragraph is long and rambling but it conveys the promise of writing, using a metaphor of men digging a ditch who spot something brilliant in the distance.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the working of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest.

This is why I write: to touch God and share that experience with the world.

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