Writing vs. Publishing

I'm a life-long writer. Since I was eighteen I've thought of myself as a writer. Early on I wrote stories and poems, very few of which were ever actually published. Later I became an academic author, publishing a text book and dozens of articles and reviews. Even now my job involves a good deal of writing: reports, correspondence, and features (although mostly anonymous) for an educational website for which I am both an author and editor.

At first, I assumed that the end of writing was publishing. But even as I discovered that I could easily publish all of the articles and reviews I cared to write (editors want copy), I began to lose interest in publication. I'm not sure why my interest has waned, but I am intrigued by that change of attitude, and that is one reason I'm trying to sort out for myself the distinction between writing and publishing.

Of course, at one level writing is communication. I suppose even diaries and journals are so intended. But publication implies a special kind of communication, generally with strangers. Even someone like Montaigne, who says he published his essays mainly for his family and friends, allowed that he also shaped them for a much larger audience of strangers. In his case that may have been a substitute for the conversation he had once enjoyed with his friend, Étienne de La Boétie, who died and left him without a sympatheic ear to listen to him or eyes to read him.

But there is also a element of vanity in publication, as well as validation: I publish, therefore I exist. Even an anonymous publication can fulfill this desire for validation, although secretly. But to see one's name in print is a great motive for most writers. I believe Roland Barthes, the French author and critic, once said that one of the chief pleasures for the writer is to read one's own work. There is also an opportunity for the writer to fashion another self, a writing self quite distinct from our normal mundane identity, something both Montaigne and Barthes commented on.

But not all writers publish, or even desire to publish. One thinks of the complicated situations of authors as different as Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka or J.D. Salinger or even, to some extent, John Donne and William Shakespeare. Not everything is written for publication. And yet still I believe that writing is essentially an existential act.