So I’ve been thinking about viruses.
Haven’t you?
Last month I taught at a conference where Brandon “Check out my dimple and my NY Times Bestsellers” Mull said that passion is contagious. He meant passion for our writing. If you’re feeling it when you write, someone should feel it when he reads. I love that. Here’s how Brenda Ueland said that Tolstoy said it:
“Art is infection. The artist has a feeling and he expresses it and at once this feeling infects other people and they have it too. And the infection must be immediate or it isn’t art. If you have to puzzle timidly over a picture or book, and try, try to like it and read many erudite critics on the subject so that you can say at last: “Yes, I think I really do begin to understand it and see that it is just splendid! Real Art!” Then it is not art. (Though it might be Art to others who would see it and be immediately infected.)” (from IF YOU WANT TO WRITE, 1938 page 105.)
I think I have the virus. The passion virus. I read things that strike me as brilliant, and I don’t even wait for a critic (or a blogger, or a friend, or a Kid) to tell me it’s good. I just feel it and I know, and I want to do something about it. I want to write better. I want to read better. I want to play an instrument (um, but I don’t actually do that), and I want to bake something beautiful and I want someone else to feel it, too. I want someone else to Get It.
And it goes both ways. I’m reading at a YA novel I’ve heard a bunch of buzz about, and I’m not feeling it. I should be, but I’m not. The premise is great. But the leaps, the jumps from here to there are just TOO MUCH WORK for me. At another time, maybe I’d feel it, but my revisions are Hard Work right now, and we all know I’m not willing to do that much Hard Work in a day. One thing is enough. So there’s no passion virus for me in that one.
And that’s okay.
Because there are as many kinds of books as there are readers, and writers. We can’t please everyone, any more than we can expect to be pleased by everything. (Unless you happen to be DeNae, who is pleased by every-everything, all the time.)
And what if I’m not feeling the passion virus on my own work? What then?
I try anyway. I dive in. I read some of my chapters, or at least some of my scenes, and I breathe in really deep and try to catch something. (Like when I was in 2nd grade and my cousin C and I walked around Boston’s suburbs in the rain trying to catch pneumonia. If you don’t understand that, you’ve never been a middle child drama queen, so don’t even try.) And often it works, the lurking and the breathing in. There’s something there. Usually. And if I can catch it, even just a little, then the germ can spread and I can feel the passion again. Also, I can steal the germ from someone else’s work. Because isn’t that how we all caught it in the first place? At the knees of a parent or teacher, spinning webs of Passion Virus for us to catch?
Breathe it in, and get sick of it all.
(8) Comments for this blog
My dad gave me the germ. He read to me from babyhood and I’ve never seen him without a book stuffed somewhere about him. =] That’s a germ that I hope I can’t get rid of. Of this sickness, I am blissfully content.
I’ve read a few passionless-pieces of late but just finished a book in the wee hours (we won’t say how wee) that has me brimming with germy passion. I love when that happens.
My dad gave me the germ. He read to me from babyhood and I’ve never seen him without a book stuffed somewhere about him. =] That’s a germ that I hope I can’t get rid of. Of this sickness, I am blissfully content.
I’ve read a few passionless-pieces of late but just finished a book in the wee hours (we won’t say how wee) that has me brimming with germy passion. I love when that happens.
LOL! I love it! Those are the kind of viruses I can handle. =)
LOL! I love it! Those are the kind of viruses I can handle. =)
Watchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis? Have you READ my blog? This past weekend I was told by two guys who have known me for 10 years, whose kids I’ve taught piano to, who were both in my gospel doctrine classes forever – that I was a bad example and I needed to do a serious re-think of the ‘tone’ of my writing.
I can’t wait to put them in my novel. One of them is going to be a bi-sexual embezzeler who gets eaten by a tiger, and the other one is going to get run over by a circus train.
Let that be a warning to all those Sassy McSassy Pantses.
Watchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis? Have you READ my blog? This past weekend I was told by two guys who have known me for 10 years, whose kids I’ve taught piano to, who were both in my gospel doctrine classes forever – that I was a bad example and I needed to do a serious re-think of the ‘tone’ of my writing.
I can’t wait to put them in my novel. One of them is going to be a bi-sexual embezzeler who gets eaten by a tiger, and the other one is going to get run over by a circus train.
Let that be a warning to all those Sassy McSassy Pantses.
If I waited for passion in all of my endeavors I would get very little done. However, when something does get me I can hardly wait to get more of it!
If I waited for passion in all of my endeavors I would get very little done. However, when something does get me I can hardly wait to get more of it!