I’m reading Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb this week.

Not telling the prophetic dreams makes them sick. It’s like an obsession, says one of the dreamers. It feels, upon waking, like the dream must be told, or at least written down. Otherwise it’s a great sickening weight upon me.

Even if no one else ever reads it, writing something down is a kind of telling. A sort of giving it over to the world. It’s an object now, something that has an existence independently of me. If someone were to find it they could read it, whether I wanted them to or not. However deeply I bury it in the drawer it can still be found.

It’s like grief or misery: it feels impossible to keep it to yourself. You need to share it, whether that’s by talking about it with others or inflicting it upon them. A lot of evil can be explained by the very human need to share what you have suffered.

“I’ve suffered for my art … Now it’s your turn.”

What if I write it down and immediately burn it or tear it to shreds? Then no one would be able to read it. But still it seems to have the same effect: having made it real, an object, I seem to have satisfied the desire to share what was burdening me. Almost as if I believed in an all-seeing God: I wrote it down and so the dream was there fully-formed, on paper, for a time, enough time that God will have seen it. I’ve shared it, confessed it, and my work is done.

But couldn’t God have just looked into my mind and seen the dream, without me having to go to the effort of writing it down? I don’t think so. I don’t think ideas are fully formed when they’re just swirling around in my mind. They need to be pinned down somehow, made concrete. Only then do they take on a real shape. Only then does an idea find its existence.

The most frustrating thing to feel if you are a writer, or any kind of artist, is that you have an idea but don’t know how to express it. You start to wonder: do I even have an idea if I can’t find the words to express it? If it’s so jumbled that I can feel that it makes sense somehow but can’t say exactly how? If it’s there in my mind but I can’t utter it, is it anything at all?

This explains why interesting art has to be at least a little bit weird. If an idea is really new then the current forms just won’t be able to express it. You have to bend and twist them. You have to say it without saying it. People who say that “difficult” art is deliberate obfuscation and pretentiousness surely have never seriously tried to create any art of their own. An artist can only feel pity for another artist when they see a work fail somehow, either in the work itself or the way it is received. And great joy when a work hits its mark and the world is changed forever.