Critic’s Perspective

I was thinking about how one of the ways I use this journal is to get a critic’s perspective on my own work. If I see trends or themes emerging, I can start to move toward them or away from them. If I get too involved in it, though, I start to delve into metafiction, which a lot of people see as a bygone phase. However, I think to a certain extent it’s inherent in the written word. Other art forms don’t have that. Movies and plays are almost entirely voyeuristic. Life is just happening in front of you. With literature, someone has to have written it, and the author has to decide: do I want to be upfront about the fact that I wrote this, or do I want to put up a pretense that someone else wrote it? Or do I want to play with that uncertainty?

Sometimes I think the critic’s perspective is none of my business. But then I start writing stuff that nobody understands at all, including myself. Or I’m just transcribing sex fantasies.