Why writers need integrity:

Part 2: taking risks when the world is unravelling

Make good art

Photo by Amauri Mejía on Unsplash

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. … Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work — which meant that life did not feel like work.

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.

Unlearn what you think you know in order to truly live

Photo by Amauri Mejía on Unsplash

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.

Look into yourself … Art is not something which … you are not or which you are. If a thorough search of yourself fails to reveal the presence of this something, you may be perfectly sure that no amount of striving, academic or otherwise, can bring it into your life. But if you are this something — then, gentle reader, no amount of discrimination and misapprehension can possibly prevent you from becoming an Artist. … You will know that when all’s said and done (and the very biggest Butter Baron has bought the very last and least Velasquez) “to become an Artist” means nothing: whereas to become alive, or one’s self, means everything.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live.

Pause and then …

Photo by Thanos Pal on Unsplash

What is art, But life upon the larger scale, the higher,

When, graduating up in a spiral line

Of still expanding and ascending gyres,

It pushes toward the intense significance

Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?

Art’s life, — and where we live, we suffer and toil.

Becoming a different story

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Editor, author, feminist & part-time nomad. Helping others develop their writing life and practice. Blog @ https://janfortune.com/

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Jan Fortune

Editor, author, feminist & part-time nomad. Helping others develop their writing life and practice. Blog @ https://janfortune.com/