Cycling home from the song improvisation workshop, I complimented my fellow student on her amazing performance. She blushed, looked away, and to drive the point home stated that she was terrible at accepting compliments. “Of course you are,” I replied, “or you wouldn’t be practicing improvisation theatre, or any other brand of performing art.”

A quick survey of the other participants in the workshop revealed that indeed, all of us were shy, socially inhibited, and recognition-starved. A huge generalization was quickly agreed upon: anyone working, or craving to work, in a creative profession is motivated by a dire need for recognition. I remembered the words of K.D. Wentworth: “If we didn’t feel out of place in the world, we wouldn’t be writers.”

And just a few weeks back I read Connie Palmen, who wrote: “Writing originates in silence, fear, shyness and a perhaps disproportionate aversion to dishonesty, particularly one’s own. […] the source of [the ambition to write] is the opposite of something like vanity: it’s the justly or unjustly felt inability to reveal oneself in daily life.”*

So is that it? Is all ambition to write (fiction) a craving for recognition and an accompanying inability to express oneself by other means? Are our stories nothing but beacons shouting out, “here I am, please hear me”? I like to claim that sometimes a story’s just a story. But maybe it never is.

Opinions, anyone?

* ‘I.M.’ by Connie Palmen, 2005, available from Amazon in english and from bol.com in dutch.