Atwood: the world grows around you
Writing seems to have this increasingly outward-looking psychological mechanism–Margaret Atwood says that writing encourages a natural progression beyond one’s first hopes in art and beyond one’s narrow self:
The third period [of my writing] runs from 1976 … to the present [1982]. It covers my growing involvement with human rights issues, which for me are not separate from writing. When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings; as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There’s no contradiction.
When you begin to write you’re in love with the language, with the act of creation, with yourself partly; but as you go on, the writing–if you follow it–will take you places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen. I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me. (“Introduction,” Second Words 14-15)
It would be interesting to see if we could trace this progression in different writers using different genres, including the new social media.
Have you read Atwood’s take on Twitter? It’s on the New York Review Blog, March 29th.
Here is the link to the Atwood piece about Twitter: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/