Just rude

I found a wonderful paragraph in a wonderful interview in an article printed in the January 2009 issue of The Writer magazine. Jamie Pietras is interviewing Debby Applegate, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher, which she titled The Most Famous Man in America. (I wish I could figure out how to put that link in without leaving a giant gap in my post!)

Applegate is from an academic background, but for this biography, she read books about writing thrillers, mysteries, and even porn! She asked herself, "What is is I wanted to do? I wanted to make ink and paper move somebody - whether it was to tears, or to laughter, or at the very minimum, turning a page." Yes, ma'am! Me too!

Near the conclusion of the interview, the question is: "What's the most important piece of advice you can offer aspiring biographers?" She says something so brilliant, and so applicable to Art in general in my opinion, or perhaps even all interactions between humans, that I wanted to post it for you. Her answer:

Here's what I tell aspiring writers, and it always causes an initial ripple of shock and dismay: Writing is not about self-expression. If that's your goal, then keep a diary, write secret poems, sing songs in your bedroom. But if you have the audacity to ask people to stop what they are doing and pay attention to your words, then the goal must now be to retain the interest of your audience and to reward them for their attention in some way. (That can be with anything you please: knowledge, inspiration, flattery, pleasure, awareness, heightened emotion, catharsis, etc.) To do anything else is just rude, not to mention unsuccessful.