HATING THE READER
When I say that 'my books should mean nothing to me and everything to the reader' I'm stressing the importance of the private journey. It's something that came naturally when I was an artist of psycho-figurative life-size oil paintings in the 80's and 90's. During the openings for these one-man shows, clients would come up to me and tell me the story of the painting as they saw it, what it meant to them. They were wrong, I don't even know what most of those (destroyed) paintings ever meant, but the viewer inserted him/herself into the picture. There have been many a writer/artist/composer whose MOST MEMORABLE work is the work they themselves didn't love the most. I could do a little more research into this but my vague belief is enough to keep me going on this. I mean, I'll be adamant here and say I will not do the research for you guys, the evidence is all about you. You just have to look. Read enough biographies or letters from 'the stars of the imaginational medium' and you'll see that their favourite piece paled into comparison with their most famous piece. There seems no point in thinking you've just completed 'your most amazing book yet' if it doesn't resonate with the reader on some personal level ... and by this I don't mean, it looks a lot like the last book I read in that vein and I HATE to change my eye-diet. What I'm saying is you can never second-guess the reader - he's a fucking mystery. What I'm also saying is, yes, you might enjoy what you're writing. To put the passion into the theme/task, you have to. But the book that means EVERYTHING to the reader can't mean the same to the writer. It's impossible. If we linearly extrapolate to infinity we find the the more a book has meaning to a reader the less it can have meaning to the writer. The personal journey ensures that the mutual meaning is infinitely stretched to a one-dimensional extremeness. Therefore, though we might think what we write is good (though it's mostly not) we can't expect a book that has meaning to the reader to have any meaning to us. We're just the conveyors of the message. It's the reader who (eventually) makes something of the books we write. Their own appraisal of your work will be its undoing or its journey into history.
