The #WeNeedDiverseBooks was a mixed bag for me, too - on the one hand, as you said, I thought "Yes! Of course we do! This is obvious and wonderful. All sorts of diverse books." On the other hand, the tweets that went along with the hashtag seemed more and more shaming instead of uplifting as time went on, and eventually I realized that every example of diversity was, in itself, fitting into a neat box, and if one's diversity doesn't meet these specific criteria, it apparently doesn't count. GRR.
Dorothy Sayers wrote extensively on the importance of "doing one's own work," no matter how ignoble it might seem to others, because doing someone else's work, even if it looks more important than ours, means we won't be doing it well. We can't: it isn't our work. She uses Harriet Vane to demonstrate this is Gaudy Night, when some people are criticizing Harriet for continuing to write murder mysteries after she herself was charged (and acquitted) for murder. She responds something along the lines of "Perhaps anyone with proper feeling would rather scrub floors than continue to write - but you see, I should scrub floors very badly, and I write murder mysteries rather well." And later on in the same book, she meets someone who gave up scholarship to become a farmer, because farming was a more useful work, and sees the terrible toll it took on this person, who is a miserable and bad farmer, and had been a very good and happy scholar.
Whenever I start to feel unhappy about my "little" writing, or my own small sphere of influence, I try to remind myself of that. As much more important as other people's work might look to me, I am only asked to do my work, and do it well, and if everyone in the world did their own work well, how much better of a world it would be.
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Date: 2014-05-02 12:49 pm (UTC)From:Dorothy Sayers wrote extensively on the importance of "doing one's own work," no matter how ignoble it might seem to others, because doing someone else's work, even if it looks more important than ours, means we won't be doing it well. We can't: it isn't our work. She uses Harriet Vane to demonstrate this is Gaudy Night, when some people are criticizing Harriet for continuing to write murder mysteries after she herself was charged (and acquitted) for murder. She responds something along the lines of "Perhaps anyone with proper feeling would rather scrub floors than continue to write - but you see, I should scrub floors very badly, and I write murder mysteries rather well." And later on in the same book, she meets someone who gave up scholarship to become a farmer, because farming was a more useful work, and sees the terrible toll it took on this person, who is a miserable and bad farmer, and had been a very good and happy scholar.
Whenever I start to feel unhappy about my "little" writing, or my own small sphere of influence, I try to remind myself of that. As much more important as other people's work might look to me, I am only asked to do my work, and do it well, and if everyone in the world did their own work well, how much better of a world it would be.