Politics & Power Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

The fantasy Sturgeon punctures here is the monkish genius who creates in perfect isolation, judges their own work as transcendent, then performs some purifying act of self-erasure. He treats that image as not just unlikely but psychologically incoherent: if you truly believe you wrote something “utterly superb,” the impulse isn’t martyrdom, it’s contact. The line “You just don’t do that” lands like a finger jab on the table, less argument than verdict, a refusal to dignify romantic posturing with debate.

Sturgeon’s intent is pragmatic and slightly exasperated: literature isn’t completed at the moment of private satisfaction; it becomes real when it enters a marketplace of readers, editors, rejection slips, praise, misunderstanding. The repeated “You send it out. You have to send it out” turns creativity into obligation. Not a hustle slogan, more a moral claim about communication: art that never risks an audience is closer to daydreaming than craft.

Context matters. Sturgeon spent a career inside genres often treated as disposable, where gatekeepers, pulp economics, and stigma made “sending it out” both necessary and bruising. That background sharpens the subtext: the true drama isn’t burning pages, it’s enduring the ordinary humiliations of publication while still believing the work deserves daylight. The “Great American Novel” name-drop is bait; he’s mocking the grandiose framing that keeps writers waiting for perfection. What he advocates is braver: finishing, releasing, and letting the world answer back.