if your work is solely driven by how people respond to it, you’ll create something popular but soulless if it’s driven by how you feel about it, you’ll create something potent but obscure but if your work is a dialogue between self & world, it can be both resonant & true
“You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art.
Do what’s personal... See more
Do what’s personal... See more
If you write to please others, you are selling out. You are in the process of audience capture. This way of talking, which is how the fear in me talks, is common—as if writing for an audience and writing for yourself are at odds with each other. I really used to feel like that.
But I no longer think that it is quite right. The relationship between... See more
But I no longer think that it is quite right. The relationship between... See more
Henrik Karlsson • Writing as Communion
“Everything I do is just personal taste and it’s what [my book The Creative Act] is about. Really, for [people and artists] to trust in themselves. Make something that speaks to themselves. And hopefully someone else will like it. But you can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart... See more