J.D. Salinger, who cherished his privacy, died last week and all the newspapers were quoting his famous comment about publishing: “There is marvelous peace in not publishing. .….Publishing is a terrible invasion of privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” 

Verlyn Klinkenborg commented in the New York Times editorial page: “[Salinger’s] half-century of solitude and silence was a creative act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will. This is the core truth that readers – and writers, too – often struggle with. Beneath the riches of the creative life, and hidden well away from the claims we place upon the writers we care for, there is still the one life, the ordinary life, to be lived.”

A few days later Jennifer Finney Boylan chimed in with a wonderful OpEd piece in the Times not buying this business of writing just for your own pleasure: “It’s hard to disagree with that on the surface; writing can be great fun. But to create fiction – or non-fiction, for that matter – without any thought of a reader seems creepy to me, the ultimate exercise in self-indulgence.”

I’d love to hear comments from readers about this. Do you write with publishing in mind? Or for your own pleasure?  I think I’d write no matter what, because for most of us writing is a compulsion. We have to do it to – to organize the chaos and make sense of our lives, to keep track of ourselves. However, I would not rewrite – and let me tell you I’m capable of a zillion drafts – if I didn’t think there was the possibility of getting published.

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I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school and being so excited and inspired by it that I spent the rest of my senior year writing pages and pages of terrible fiction trying to imitate Holden’s voice.  It’s a thrilling thing to discover such a book when you’re just starting out to write – and I don’t think it hurts if you try to imitate a writer as long as you’re trying to sound like the best.  I went on to imitate Colette,Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe too, then Joan Didion  etc.– and finally as we all eventually do if we write long enough, for better or worse I found my own voice.