Do You Have it All Backwards?'You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.'
--novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. We happen to think this is the real source of much so-called writer's block: people enthralled with the idea of writing, but without anything urgent to say. In any case, you can review earlier mentions of the reigning sage of the Jazz Age here.
14 Comments:
How funny that F. Scott Fitzgerald showed up as your blog topic one day after he appeared in my "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" calendar. According to that, Fitzgerald once said that using an exclamation point in your writing was like laughing at your own jokes.
Precisely, why I haven't sat down to write the Great American Novel yet.
I'm waiting until I know the meaning of life, or something equally profound.
You're right. Quantity of writing is not as important to me as quality. I can see brainstorming, but if nothing seems important, OK.
Thanks for adding your thoughts, everyone.
Most of the time I have no idea what I want to say when I start. It's only when I've finished that I realise I had something worth saying.
I often find that to be true as well, Jim. Does that ring true for anyone else?
Jim's comment reminds me of "spontaneous writing" -- you just sit and write and see what comes of it. Often times, you WILL find something good, whether it's a sentence, a paragraph, or -- in those rare instances -- the entire piece. The creative mind is a wonderful creature.
To the words, always.
I like your sign-off phrase, Geoff. It sounds like a fitting manifesto.
I'll probably be the voice of dissent, again, and I find Fitz's comments to be ever more true than ever before, with so many writers writing these days who have nothing to say, nothing to add, nothing to contribute. Obviously Fitz was talking about the need we've discussed before: the compulsion to get it out, to write or make art or paint or whatever. I agree with that. But what does one do in an age when the imprimatur of Writer is granted to all annually minted new MFA grads in writing programs? Certainly they have all written.
But do they have anything to SAY?
Mostly not.
Funny, but I also thought of that bloodless army of MFAs when I first came across this quote. I also thought of this earlier thought from playwright David Mamet.
http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2008/05/image-of-writer-as-knock-around-guy-you.html
or the block is from having too much to say and we haven't organized up in our heads yet to spew it out on the page.
It's in the details.
Glad you mention this, Steve, because I've always thought that it's nearly impossible to organize any piece of writing in one's head, and that it's thus essential to get it down somewhere (a screen or blank page) where we can begin to really see it, and from there begin to shape it into something. I think for most people, that's all but impossible to do in your head. So yes, that certainly would create a block, and a serious one.
In that interview Mamet opines:
"I think the reason there are a lot of novels about How Mean My Mother Was To Me and all that shit is because the writers may have learned something called 'technique' but they've neglected to have a life. What the f__k are they going to write about?"
This is absolutely what the root of the problem is. Very few of those newly-minted MFAs granted the arcane title of Writer have actually done any LIVING as yet. Some few have, of course.
I had a friend out in California who, in her late 50s, after her kids had all moved out and moved on, and after her divorce, during all of which time she wrote poems for herself alone, entered and thrived at an MFA program in San Francisco. She got her MFA for all the right reasons, at the right time of her life. And her poems were lightyears better than any of her 30-years-younger peers, starting with the truth that she actually had some real experience to draw upon.
This is also why some writers are not easy to get into until one has done some living for oneself. I appreciate Hemingway more now than I did years ago, for instance. And May Sarton was a writer who one needs to start reading at age 40; before then, you haven't gotten old enough yet yourself to be able to hear what she had to say.
In my opinion, of course.
Thanks for pointing out what I should have also mentioned: the obvious fact that MFAs (that's masters in fine arts, by the way) as a degree or a class of people who acquire them are not remotely the problem. So I made a foolish generalization, which I'm often calling others on.
A few weeks ago, you reminded me of May Sarton, and I went back and reread some portions of her books that I had mostly skimmed many years ago, and it's precisely as you predicted. She gets better with age--the reader's age, that is.
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