Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power

Robert Frost called his art a lover's quarrel with the world. Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity of a priest of God. George Orwell believed the writer's task was to set right the injustices caused by what he called the bloody hand of the empire at work. I think all three men could no more stop writing than they could will themselves to stop breathing. Hemingway, in the same statement about probity, said that once writing became the artist's greatest pleasure as well as his greatest vice, the only thing that could separate him from it was death.

When I was a teacher of creative writing, a student would occasionally ask me if I thought he had talent, if indeed he should try to make a career of his writing. I never answered the question, because the student had asked the wrong question. A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world. If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.

I have never been able to see more than two or perhaps three scenes ahead in a story. For me the creative process is more one of discovery than creation.

Jack Kerouac said that there was no such thing as failure in art, not when you genuinely invest yourself in it. What a critic might call failure is just part of larger work that is ongoing.

The material for the stories is everywhere. The whole human family becomes your cast of characters. You can give voice to those who have none and expose those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit. As an artist you have automatic membership in a group that is loathed, feared and denigrated by every dictator and demagogue in the world.

from Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power (James Lee Burke)