“Popular fiction is trash. Art isn't worth anything unless it means something, unless it's saying something, and if you're not going to say something, you might as well keep your mouth shut.”

 When I offer that challenge out loud, every artist I know immediately leaps on the defensive, or offensive, depending on their individual levels of aggression and how many coffees they drank beforehand. And rightfully so – it's a load of pants. Intellectually, we know that everything we create is an expression of how we see the world, a sharing of our individual experience and perception. Everything we create makes a statement, even if that statement is, on our bad days, a strange sort of bubbly noise followed by a hiccup.

 And yet despite knowing that, every one of us at some point or another feels that their work isn't any good. Not worth reading, let alone writing. Not going to change the world, not even going to change our bank balance. It's just going to squat over our thoughts and occasionally belch cliches. A voice in our head tells we're just embarrassing ourselves, and we wonder what the point is.

 I'll tell you what the point is.

 In 1852, an Ohio author published a 40 week serial inspired by stories she had heard from escaped slaves. She built on her Christian beliefs and her feelings about slavery and created a story that was a take-heart-from-sacrifice tragedy. It was a topical issue at the time, but the story was confronting and uncomfortable to read. There was little reason to expect it could capture the interest of more than a handful of already-converted readers. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin became the best-selling book of the 19th century, second only to the Bible. It is credited as fueling the abolitionist cause, and being instrumental in the development of the legislation prohibiting slavery.  The book quite literally changed the world. It also embedded a host of black stereotypes in the collective consciousness, many of which are still evident in film and literature today – nobody ever said that you'd change the world for the better all the time. While the book has been roundly criticised for just about everything you can criticise, there's no denying its influence on the Western world.

 Harriet Beecher Stowe had no way of knowing that would happen. There was no neon-lit arrow from the universe saying THIS IDEA IS WORTHY. She just wrote a story from her passion and beliefs.

 It's an extreme example – you or I could hardly expect to create another Uncle Tom's Cabin. But the point isn't to obsess over the fact that we can't rewrite how the world works with our pens. It's this: the phenomenon of Uncle Tom's Cabin was borne of that book speaking individually to people. People  read the book and took something from it. That's all.

 Every work of art will speak to someone, somewhere. It's rare to create the kind of critical mass of Uncle Tom's Cabin – it's rare to even hear of the person for whom you made a difference, and it will almost never be the kind of difference you were intending or expecting, but they're out there. You can bring a new way of looking at things to someone you've never met. You can change their life.

 But only if you ignore that voice and write the book.

• Add New
• Search
• RSS

Comments (0)

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2