The Grasshopper #57: Belief
“If you want to move someone else as an artist, you yourself necessarily must have been deeply moved by what it is you are writing. But you must keep exploiting that emotion in yourself over and over and over and over until you’ve become completely cold about it. Or fairly cold.”
~ Truman Capote
Capote couldn’t be more right on this one, though he was supposedly bombed on vodka when he said it. His best writing finds him moved by life. When he lost that, his career hit the skids and he became desperate to regain it, but he no longer had the means, consumed by fame and alcohol.
He pioneered non-fiction fiction, portraying the brutal murder of a Kansas farm family using investigative reporting and novelistic drama in his best seller In Cold Blood. Unfortunately his career went downhill from there.
It should be noted that he should have given co-author credit to his childhood friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, a book considered by many to be the finest American novel of the Twentieth century. She worked closely with Capote, doing much of the legwork as they questioned dozens of Kansans while researching the book.
That omission may have been the earliest sign of Capote’s decline.
Their commitment to the story shows throughout the book as they recount the often horrifying story with compassion and clarity.
Much of my writing is about divisive political issues and to be successful with those touchy subjects, compassion and clarity help keep me from veering into cynicism. It’s a balancing act because I am passionate about what I write about, as I believe you have to be, regardless of subject matter.
These characteristics will elevate your writing beyond the mundane and rote. When you’re starting a project, check your commitment to see if you can sustain your own interest from beginning to end. Like many, I started several novels before completing one, and I can see in hindsight that it was because I was not committed to the story.
Discerning readers can sense your belief in the story and that commitment lends power and conviction to it. Find that that in yourself and your writing will bloom.
I’m noticing that the quality of a lot of writing on Medium is bad and there is more of it. I suspect this is due to flooding the platform with stories written by AI chatbots to generate revenue without doing the work. I’m also seeing my numbers dropping there, along with my income.
This is going to be a big problem and I’m not sure there is a lot that can be done, at least at this point in time. There are AI detectors but the reports I’m seeing are that they don’t work very well. But their developers say these programs, which use AI themselves, are learning and becoming more sophisticated at detecting fake writing.
I know there is a lot of doom and gloom in the writing community about this sea change in the world of online publishing, but I don’t see anything good coming out of this and AI is being integrated into all kinds of things at a breakneck pace. And that is not going to change.
Substack is undoubtedly seeing a lot of AI-driven newsletters. And they will also face issues with maintaining quality, though like Medium, they don’t really curate content except to remove and block hate content.
I wish I could say The Grasshopper pays my bills, but it doesn’t, not even close. When my Medium numbers started translating into actual money, I wondered if it was too good to be true. It would be a sad thing if greed and AI were to dilute quality until paying readers peel away.
It’s scary how fast this is happening and how inevitable it now feels.
This week has seen political activity in the States start to heat up. There are big problems to deal with like our debt ceiling and scandals galore. The rhetoric and extremism are also getting amped up and we are still eighteen months from the actual national election.
My writing these past few years has been consumed by trying to understand how all this fits together, and it is a complex puzzle. The world is becoming a far more interconnected place, despite the efforts of autocrats to keep us divided. It really feels like we are entering a new phase of humanity with the AI breakthroughs I discussed earlier.
Documenting these changes and commenting on them feels like a responsibility for me in the third third of my life. The Buddhist in me knows that change is constant but awareness is something we seek to unlock. That means taking in the world, all of it. But the path to that is like the path to better writing. A part of you must go away and practice your craft, learning to see and clarify more things.
And sometimes you hit a wall where it all becomes a bit much and you question why you’re here scribbling out stories, ideas, and opinions. I’ve certainly wrestled with that lately. This writing life I’ve chosen is often an uncertain one, with its ups and downs, but the ups outweigh those days when you’re just not feeling it.
For me that is often a sign that something larger is looming on the horizon, a new set of stories or a chance to tackle something new. We’ll see.
Thanks for bearing with me this week. Did you write today?
Martin
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Thanks Doug. I try to keep it real.
Martin, I just want you to know how much I appreciate your writing. As a reader, I have noticed the uptick in volume of stories out there on important topics. I can't keep up. But I always keep up with the stories you write.