Everyone is unique as a character due to life experience. However, an
artist is special; an artist has the drive and the confidence to present
themselves to their audience honestly. An artist is vulnerable yet fearless to
sacrifice.
If a writer is to become an artistic success they must also be completely open, presenting us with a new and unique craft to study. A writer intervenes with whatever life experiences have inspired them to provide an original combination of literary elements and a new journey for the reader. This personal and courageous transformation evokes recognition of the familiar within the reader yet also a desire to explore the unknown. It is a writer's loyalty to themselves which in turn provides loyal readers.
There have been many writers who have been restricted in what they can publish during their lifetime due to various social conventions. One of those is the poet Emily Dickinson who although as a young woman was able to gain a college degree, a great rarity in 1840's New England, was still subjected to the strict conformities of women at the time. She published fewer than thirty poems in her lifetime, yet her determination to accept the dangers of pushing those boundaries gained her a voice and work to be admired for literary generations to follow.
For a woman of the time Dickinson was strong willed and true to her work. Helen McNeil explains that; when editors insisted on conventionalizing her work, she felt her poems 'robbed' from her and withdrew from publishing.
Dickinson expands upon her feelings in poem 709:
"Publication - is the Auction/ Of the Mind."
If a writer is to become an artistic success they must also be completely open, presenting us with a new and unique craft to study. A writer intervenes with whatever life experiences have inspired them to provide an original combination of literary elements and a new journey for the reader. This personal and courageous transformation evokes recognition of the familiar within the reader yet also a desire to explore the unknown. It is a writer's loyalty to themselves which in turn provides loyal readers.
There have been many writers who have been restricted in what they can publish during their lifetime due to various social conventions. One of those is the poet Emily Dickinson who although as a young woman was able to gain a college degree, a great rarity in 1840's New England, was still subjected to the strict conformities of women at the time. She published fewer than thirty poems in her lifetime, yet her determination to accept the dangers of pushing those boundaries gained her a voice and work to be admired for literary generations to follow.
For a woman of the time Dickinson was strong willed and true to her work. Helen McNeil explains that; when editors insisted on conventionalizing her work, she felt her poems 'robbed' from her and withdrew from publishing.
Dickinson expands upon her feelings in poem 709:
"Publication - is the Auction/ Of the Mind."
I originally found the editing process at University difficult. In fact I felt offended when people suggested changes. Now I have grown thicker skinned about it, but I can understand how Dickinson would have felt about being forced to make changes that fundamentally altered her work.
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