Letters to the Editor
Amerigo
Published Letters: 955 Editor's Choice: 60
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Maybe...
[Read the article: Dear Sir, I write today to say that I cannot write]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As usual, the majority of responses above fail to see the forest for the trees. The message in the two letters and Cary's response is not really about writing per se, it's about unburdening yourself from self-judgment and analysis.
Maybe, maybe not. The LW is awfully vague about what kind of writing he/she is not able/unable to do.
There seems to be a difference between writing as a way of making a living, or at least for others, and writing as a means of therapy or playing at being a writer.
Jane Austen, for example, played at being a writer when she was producing her juvenilia, but this play, as so often in our species, was a means of developing skills that she was able to use for financial gain later on. And even when her writing was not for publication, it was certainly narrowcast to her immediate circle.
In his famous essay Why I Write George Orwell starts off thus:
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
Orwell identifies four reasons for writing:
1.Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm...Above the level of a (railroad schedule), no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
3. Historical impulse. A desire to record how things are and save them up for posterity.
4. Political purpose. A desire to influence people.
Finally, and most famously, he wrote...
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if
one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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And anotther thing...
[Read the article: Dear Sir, I write today to say that I cannot write]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is always easier to write when you have something good to write about, and now the LW can write about the experience of being an LW, and maybe get that published in Salon and have his/her quarter hour of Warholian fame.
I would not claim to be a writer (can't you tell?), but one of my best moments was winning $500 second prize in a Christmas short story contest run by a national newspaper. I was a bit disappointed not to win the $1000 first prize, but a year or two later one of the judges, a newspaper editor who was playing for a sports team I was playing against, told me that the judges thought my story was easily the best submitted, but that some of them thought it was too good to be written by an amateur, and they didn't want to give the first prize to an entry that might be tinted by plagiarisn. Well, if you can't win, that is not a bad reason to be second.
However, he was in a position to make it up to me a bit later, when he published a series of three feature articles I wrote about my experiences as contestant on the TV show Jeopardy!. This gave me a certain amount of local recognition and my assigned fifteen minutes of notoriety.
However, there is a huge, huge difference between writing casually about things that personally interest you, and writing professionally on assignment, or to meet publishers' deadlines.
If you don't have to write to make a living, why worry about it? The desire to write may come back, or it may not. If stuff that needs to be written is inside you, it will force itself out, just like the gas in the homemade ginger beer bottle that exploded yesterday in my kitchen. It can't be suppressed, so it will find a way to ventilate itself.