tagryn's musings

From an interview with playwright Michel Tremblay, circa 1982.
This resonated with me, in both good and bad ways:

"The need to write? You can say what you want, you write to be loved.
It's very silly, and it's very basic. But for myself, I know that I write to be loved.
When you do something creative, even when you are insulting everyone, it
comes from a need in you to be loved. Even with the most insulting poetry,
the lowest form of theatre or the craziest novels! Just trying to attract
attention shows a need to be loved. Especially when you live in a sterile
society like ours. Writers can't deny that they have that somewhere in them.
Unless you are Fernande from L'Improptu d'Outremont and you never publish
your work. There are certainly geniuses who have written for themselves
without ever publishing. But that is something else. And if you publish, it
is for people to read you, to be read, to be loved."

I've had an internal belief for a while that the primary purpose of art is to communicate; that may be with oneself, but if it stops there, is it really art, is it really self-expression in any meaningful way? I think that's been contributing to my reluctance to write, though, as well. It can be a problem, because whether one's expression ever finds an audience is to a large part out of your hands. That's not to say one shouldn't do one's best, I think one always should for its own sake because one is able to, but expecting to reap what is sown in any measure is a sure way to a broken heart. In a way, I suppose its like love, in that how well you love is no guarantee that you will be loved back; that's the tragedy of unrequited love (and the Wizard of Oz has it completely wrong, in my opinion, when he says "A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others"). But laying aside the expectations is hard, since a lot of motivation tends to be tied up with those expectations, at least for me.