Letters to the Editor
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Maybe think about teaching writing.
> Maybe think about teaching writing.
I love that. Brilliant.
I found the first letter to Cary to be inscrutable. Good writers tend to read and study and live life in such a way as to become interesting, multifaceted human beings. They hone their craft and their intellect. Most of the literary geniuses who made major contributions to humanity via the written word didn't have the luxury of being "writers." They didn't worry about any of the nonsense in the first or second letter. Read a biography of Cervantes.
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Unfettered Words
I can relate to the letter writer because there was a period where my frequent journal writing just fizzled out and became something I did a few times a year rather than a few times a week. It turned out that I was just feeling less introspective. After a couple of years I started writing in my journal again.
If you use writing to process your feelings, perhaps your feelings need to sit for awhile before you're ready. Maybe you could try a cheap and easy visual medium. Collage? Crayons or water colors? See if what you want to say bursts forth in colors instead of words. Let the end result be as raw as your feelings.
These days I am doing both collage and journal writing, even combining the two, and the end result is emotionally satisfying.
For those who wonder why we would ever write only for ourselves--for some of us, it's a good way to arrive at the truth of our lives. We do have an audience--our present and future self. Later on, journals can become important source documents for historians trying to understand what life was like in this era, or for our descendants. Our snips of poetry, short stories, and journal entries are a record of our existence. If we write for publication, journals are a place to relax and let our hair down or even experiment.
If you consider that in a journal or diary, the writer feels absolutely free to be honest and open, then maybe you can understand why some journals have gone on to become literary classics. As soon as you imagine an outside audience, you edit yourself and become too conscious of the reader. There are pros and cons of this editing, of course. The end result may be more readable and smooth, polished, with fine grammar and meticulous spelling. Yet, some truth may be lost along the way, some raw emotion, stark with its misspellings and broken sentence structure.
So it is good that we have had journal writers and hidden poets down through the ages, some brilliant, some merely pedestrian, but all trying to be honest about their lives.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diarists for a good list of published diaries and journals.
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re: They didn't worry about any of the nonsense in the first or second letter.
Good writers also have empathy. If you could get past a writing tone that obviously grates against your genius-worshipping sensibilities, you might see a person in pain. Oh wait, no you wouldn't.
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Is it a matter of talent?
Talent is so much like ethics. It seems as though there must be such a thing -- and that it must be objective and not merely a matter of personal preference -- yet when you try to explain what it is, you find yourself very quickly engulfed in a mass of contradictions.
I would suggest two things: Read Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. Parts of it are fascinating, parts of it show a remarkable self-awareness, but so much of it is so glaringly badly written that it is hard to believe it came from the pen of a man whose gift would one day be compared to Shakespeare's. No, I do mean that literally. It seems impossible that Tolstoy was writing like this in his late 20s. Had he had the misfortune of being born in the States circa 1980, he would have been advised to pursue something else.
Next, read J.M. Coetzee's Youth. He wrote that about 10 years before coming out with his first novel. Read that, and think about it. It is amazing.
I always thought that going through hard times was what is known as . . . material.
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Correction!
J.M. Coetzee's Youth wasn't written ten years before his first novel, of course. It describes what his life was like ten years before he wrote his first novel. I'm sorry about that mistake!
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To a young poet
@ all LW-bashers. Go find a tree and vent your frustrations by knocking your head against it. No, wait, use a lamp post. If you actually feel better by exploiting a LW's courage and vulnarability, face your own problems first, cowards.
LW, I understand, to the degree that I can sympathize through words in letter. Don't pressure yourself, don't give yourself deadlines, don't compete with yourself, or others, don't think about it too much.
Live, read, enjoy the sound of wind in trees, or heavy traffic at dusk. Read the books you like. Stare through the window at your favorite coffee shop. But live, openly, enjoy living, and always take a book with you, read anywhere you find the time. It'll come back, maybe not in the way you'd expect, but you'll find it, and it will find you again.
You might want to try Rilkes "Letters to a young poet" (I think) too.
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it's not LW specifically
It's just that we have had our lifetime fill of the "wah wah, I'm a special self-centered creative artist with an existential crisis" letters.
Maybe that could be a seperate column and those who are interested can read that column. And the rest of us "unspecial" people can read the colum about the human condition.
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This isn't about writing
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. That may sound trite, but anyone who has ever found themselves trapped in the kind of cycle the author of the first letter describes knows it is not. They will read the words and even if it is just for that moment, feel a bit freer.
Something to consider when it comes to letting one's self be at peace: When Cary asks "To what king? What judge?", the answer (and issue) for many people is not just the media or our society's artificially constructed standards for existence, but God. The religion you can't or don't want to get out of your head. The voices from childhood. Something your mom or dad said when you were 12. The list goes on and on. So you see, there's nothing trite about it at all. It's the challenge of a lifetime.