« I’m not sure what I find more depressing. The thought of all the bad books in the world, or the thought of all the brilliant ones. Sometimes I walk through my house and look at the shelves and coffee tables and bedside stands piled high with published words and think, « Geez, what am I doing? Does the world really need another book? »<\/p>\n
Here’s an even darker thought: Maybe it’s not a question of what the world needs, but of what certain people need to do in order to cope with the world. Maybe instead of asking ourselves, « What are we doing? » we should ask, « What are we avoiding? » What larger emotional commitments does writing enable us not to make?<\/p>\n
All these thoughts frighten me deeply.<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n
There’s a famous story about Margaret Atwood meeting a brain surgeon at a party. After some chit-chat, the surgeon announces that he plans to take up writing when he retires. « Really? » Atwood supposedly replied. « When I retire, I plan on taking up brain surgery. »<\/p>\n
From Reading books is definitely more fun than writing them<\/a>, by Leah McLaren in The Globe and Mail.<\/p>\n via Bookslut<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" « I’m not sure what I find more depressing. The thought of all the bad books in the world, or the thought of all the brilliant ones. Sometimes I walk through my house and look at the shelves and coffee tables and bedside stands piled high with published words and think, « Geez, what am… Continue reading Everybody’s writing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}