Weavers and Writers

Sylvia Plath, the famous American poet, once said:

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt. "

But what is it if not self-doubt, that inspires writers to write. If the writer is so sure and so clear about what he wants to write, why doesn't he just publish a pamphlet, why does he hide his, supposedly, clear idea and thought under the complexities of invented symbols and metaphors? And if it is indeed true, what will become of the difference between true artists and writers who make money out of writing grandiloquent speeches for dumb politicians? The quote above becomes so tragically ironical when we learn of Sylvia Plath's eventual fate - she committed suicide at the age of 28 leaving her two small children behind. If she was so sure of her poems why did she feel the need to end her life?

I started thinking about these and other things when I read this following paragraph in W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. The paragraph was hidden in between an innocuous looking description of the history of silk-industry in coastal England. Here is the paragraph:

That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are still engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.

Now isn't that an accurate picture of a writer's dilemma? And it is certainly more accurate than Sylvia Plath's version where she denies any importance to self-doubt. After spending so much of time and effort identifying and weaving complex patterns from life's raw experiences, what does a writer do when he finds out that he has got hold of the wrong thread or not sure if it is the right thread? And the paradox is that even after he knows this, the writer can not stop doing what he does because it is the only recourse left to him. And this is what Nabokov also says, in a typically eloquent manner in his autobiography - Speak, Memory, but more about that later. I have more prosaic matters to attend to.