Blog #1: A Writer's Responsibilities

While a writer writes for millions of readers, he also writes for himself. He has not only responsibilities to his reader, but to himself as well. Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus said that a writer, "cannot serve today those who make history, he must serve those who are subject to it." He is cited for "illuminating the problems of the human conscience." While I agree that this is part of the writer's duty to others, I think there is more. It is important for writers to depict the problems of our time, however the aspects of modern life that are not problems are important too. I enjoy writing that deals with both an individual's experience and general social issues because I do not think that these topics are so different. With an individual's experiences come the social issues and puzzles of everyday life. The writer's main duty to his readers is to draw emotion from them and make them care, even if what they are caring about is not necessarily a problem. Vonnegut describes how powerful simplistic writing can be and how one sentence can "break the heart of a reader" (21). This supports how important it is to make the reader care.

A writer's duty to himself is to always stay true to his writing style and what his values in writing are. A writer should not write about something for which he does not care. Just as Camus says, a writer cannot serve history, however he can impact the future. A writer's words, however, will have no power if he does not believe in them himself. In order to fulfill his responsibilities to others, a writer must first be sure that he is fulfilling his responsibilities to himself by staying true to himself in his writing. A writer must also stick to his own set of basic rules for writing, what Stephen KIng would consider a writing "toolbox." A writer should write what they know and utilize the tools that they have to be sure that what they write is their own. If a writer cannot be true to themselves in their writing, they cannot be true to their readers and cannot be influential in the future and to "those who are subject to it."