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.
I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?
But everything of value about me is in my books.
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