In the latest issue of Locus, Liz Hand, the award-winning author of “Last Summer at Mars Hill” and Generation Loss, had this to say about her approach to her art:

In The Red Shoes, Michael Powell’s wonderfully over-the-top film that buys into all this stuff about the transcendence of art, Lermontov (a dance impresario based on Diaghlev), has a great line: “Madame, I do not care to see my religion practiced by amateurs.” That’s sort of how I feel about it. If you’re not going to bring a certain seriousness of intent and practice to your vocation, why are you doing it? Millions of people don’t feel that way, but for me, art is the closest I can come to a religious experience.

That’s sort of how I feel about it, too. I don’t think of writing as my profession, my trade, or my craft. I think of it as my calling.

However my work is perceived by the reader, whether as only entertainment or something more, for me, the work is too important not to be taken seriously. Through the act of creation, I’m able to achieve a heightened state of consciousness. Writing is my own mind-altering drug. I’ve felt this way for a long time, as shown by the fact that I copied out this passage fifteen years ago or so written by Vladimir Nabokov, taken from a letter in which he was critiquing his brother’s poetry:

Here is what it boils down to: are you writing poetry as a sideline, because everyone does it, or are you really drawn to it irresistibly, does it surge from your soul, do images and sensations naturally don the dress of poetry, crowding to emerge? If the former is the case, and a poem is only a carefree game to you, a pleasant fashionable entertainment, the desire to hand it with a grim expression to some girl, then forget it, for you are wasting your time.

If, on the other hand, it is the latter (and I would very much like it to be so), then one must first of all realize what a difficult, responsible job it is, a job one must train for with a passion, with a certain reverence and chastity, disdaining the seeming facility with which quatrains fall together (just tack on a rhyme and it’s done) …

If you have the urge to write, do it as conscientiously as you can and try to avoid the absurdities I’ve noted above.

These two snippets of advice may sound snooty and somber to some, but I joyfully embrace them both.