Empathy is to solipsism as Texas Hold 'Em is to _______?



Ray Bradbury
 in 1975



In part as the result of a conversation with someone I didn’t know and to whom I had demurely down-played the virtues of my writing in general, and in another part due to the fact that it strikes me as one of those truisms that smacks of verisimilitude, I came suddenly to the realisation that writing (and writers) starts (and start) with solipsism and move outwards from there. [Notice how I’ve made a syntactically permissible but nearly unreadable sentence there by the use of distracting and in terms of agreements uncomfortable parentheses! What a cock.] One writes of what one knows (and can prove) – the self. Only when enough time has passed in practice can that inward gaze be slowly turned outwards, and only with constant vigilance will it stay thus. Ray Bradbury reminded me recently, writing in the introduction to a book of essays on creativity that I half-remembered existed from my time as a bookseller, and which I picked up for free thanks to those kooky free-book-nerds who leave books lying on benches in Roath Park with messages therein about releasing them into the wild for others to enjoy etc etc, that writing is comparable to music. If you (as a maestro) don’t practice for one day, you’ll know. Two days and your agent will know. Three days and your audience will know. He also says that a new simile struck him one morning – that of writing being like a landmine onto which you jump in the morning and as a result have to spend the rest of the day putting yourself back together. How that fits I don’t know, but then I’ve not been practicing for a while.