Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Interpretation
Believing you are a writer before being published is naive and can lead to painful disillusionment.
In this quote, Dan Simmons suggests that having a self-image as a writer or poet without the validation of publication can be an innocent but ultimately misplaced belief. This naivety, akin to youthful notions of immortality, can lead to a harsh awakening when faced with the realities of the writing world, emphasizing that the journey to recognition and success is fraught with challenges and potential disappointment.
In practice
During a creative writing workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the challenges and realities of becoming a published author.
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
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