There's a growing trend in our culture to think of the work we do in terms of impact. Significance! Legacy! Lot of pressure to take this kind of "from the future looking back" approach to creating art or choosing a career. And I get that. But it's also tough because, well ... we can't control impact. Right? We can try! But it's up to others. Not us.
I was flipping through my paperback of "The Last Interview" with David Foster Wallace and found this wonderful quote which I've pasted for you below. If you'd like to grab the full book, you can get it right here.
9) Amherst magazine likes to profile alumni whose work has had an impact on the world outside of Amherst. How would you describe the impact of your work? (That may be a two-part question: What kind of impact do you hope your work will have as you're creating it? And what do you think the actual impact has been?) And how do you measure the success of your work?
Sneaky, Ms. S.: this question actually comprises more than two subquestions. And unfortunately this is all stuff that I've discovered it's in my own best interests not to think much about. 'Impact' is tricky because it has so much to do with interpretation and fashion (which phenomena are far from independent of each other). Plus plain luck: the fact that you've got to find first an agent and then an editor and then an editor's publishing co. who not only like your stuff but believe it to be "viable"—which in 1999 America means salable in sufficient numbers to permit an approximate 7-percent net profit—before you even get to consider something like 'impact' the way Q9's using it. And I know way too many fine and serious writers who haven't been able to get anything published to be able to regard the whole process as anything much more than a lottery. Then, if your thing does get published, and if some combination of cultural kismet and corporate hype garners it an audience, you get to discover how extremely remote people's takes on your work are from anything you had in mind when you were working on it, plus how little whatever they feel and think about the work's author has to do with you as you know and experience yourself . . . I've hit on an effective way to handle all this schizogenic stuff, which is to keep the whole thing at a very simple level, roughly a level/vocabulary that an average U.S. fifth-grader can understand. I want my work to be good. I want to like it. This is the only part that has anything to do with me. I can't make it have an 'impact' on anybody else. This doesn't mean I can't hope it has one, but I can't do anything to guarantee it, or even to cause it. All I can do is make something as good as I can make it (this is the sort of fact that's both banal and profound), and promise myself that I'll never try to publish anything I myself don't think is good or finished. I used to have far more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking about 'impact', but they always left me with my forehead against the wall.
