19 August 2008
More Reasons Not To Be A Writer
Any aspiring writer should read what poor Jane Doe says in Salon.com. You'll see why Jane is anonymous on reading her piece. I cannot resist quoting one bit of it, that "being an author has ruined many of my greatest lifelong pleasures. Reading a book that's poorly written I pace the floor, beseeching the Muses, God and the editors of Publishers Weekly to explain why trash like this sells so much better than serious books like mine. Reading a book that's well written, I writhe, instead, with envy."
Whenever I start feeling hard done by as a writer, I think of Mozart, one of the greatest creative geniuses who ever lived, being forced to sit with the servants by the jumped up idiots who employed him. And how the stupid Archbishop of Milan didn't want him. And how he scraped around in crowded little apartments, organising piano transport to he could give concerts to stay alive. And how he couldn't write as many operas as he wanted because he couldn't afford to. You'd have thought that someone, somewhere, might have realised there was a towering genius there and given him a bit more of a break. The money he received wasn't enough and he had a pauper's funeral when he died.
Incidentally, Mozart was tiny and very thin and hardly ate a thing. I was thinking of this yesterday when reading a confident assertion on another website that Carroll was anorexic. Carroll and some of his brothers and sisters were very lightly built, and had all been brought up to dislike "greed", as well they might in a hard-up household of 11 children. He had sherry and biscuits for lunch instead of sitting down to a plate of food. Hence, he suffered from a psychological disorder, in the view of the writer of the website (it had better remain anonymous, since I'm not into being nasty about other peoples' websites.)
One may imagine how it might have been in this imaginary world if Carroll and Mozart had lived nowadays. They might have gone to the same anorexia clinic. There, they might have met - become friends - and Mozart could have written some music for "Alice in Wonderland." Aah!
;-)
Whenever I start feeling hard done by as a writer, I think of Mozart, one of the greatest creative geniuses who ever lived, being forced to sit with the servants by the jumped up idiots who employed him. And how the stupid Archbishop of Milan didn't want him. And how he scraped around in crowded little apartments, organising piano transport to he could give concerts to stay alive. And how he couldn't write as many operas as he wanted because he couldn't afford to. You'd have thought that someone, somewhere, might have realised there was a towering genius there and given him a bit more of a break. The money he received wasn't enough and he had a pauper's funeral when he died.
Incidentally, Mozart was tiny and very thin and hardly ate a thing. I was thinking of this yesterday when reading a confident assertion on another website that Carroll was anorexic. Carroll and some of his brothers and sisters were very lightly built, and had all been brought up to dislike "greed", as well they might in a hard-up household of 11 children. He had sherry and biscuits for lunch instead of sitting down to a plate of food. Hence, he suffered from a psychological disorder, in the view of the writer of the website (it had better remain anonymous, since I'm not into being nasty about other peoples' websites.)
One may imagine how it might have been in this imaginary world if Carroll and Mozart had lived nowadays. They might have gone to the same anorexia clinic. There, they might have met - become friends - and Mozart could have written some music for "Alice in Wonderland." Aah!
;-)
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