“When a new writer appears on the scene we should not expect miracles (they come later), we should expect a high degree of technical ability and a distinctive note which has nothing to do with subject matter. Such are the beginnings of an individual style. Whether or not there is any development is largely up to the writer and although we can blame lack of discipline and lack of encouragement for the wastelands of talent, perhaps we forget that without integrity a writer cannot develop at all.
Integrity is the true writer’s determination not to buckle under market forces, nor to strangle her own voice for the sake of a public who prefers its words in whispers. The pressures on young writers to produce to order and to produce more of the same, if they have had a success, is now at overload, and the media act viciously in either ignoring or pillorying any voice that is not their kind of journalese. A writer needs to be unswayed by praise or blame and skeptical of the easy friendships and sudden enmities offered by the industry in which she now has to work. The commercialization of art has inevitably included the commercialization of the writer, who is now expected to be a public figure and a target (no other word will do ) of interest. The writer should refuse all definitions; of herself, and of her work, and remember that whether her work sells or whether it doesn’t, whether it is loved or it is not, it is the same piece of work. Reaction cannot alter what is written. And what is written is the writer’s true home.
This determination to live by the work and be known by the work is not popular but it is a writer’s humility and the only humility helpful to her. Simply, the work is more important than she is, and to put it first, to put it above everything, is to allow nothing to compromise it. That includes the ordinary desire to be liked.”
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
