标题: 2013.01.09 菲茨杰拉德的伟大写作秘诀 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-4-23 11:23 标题: 2013.01.09 菲茨杰拉德的伟大写作秘诀 CULTURE
'Nothing Any Good Isn't Hard': F. Scott Fitzgerald's Secret to Great Writing
By Maria Popova
JANUARY 9, 2013
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The Great Gatsby author's surprisingly blunt advice to would-be writers
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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What is the secret of great writing? For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. For Henry Miller, about discovery. Susan Sontag saw it as self-exploration. Many literary greats anchored it to their daily routines. And yet, the answer remains elusive and ever-changing.
In the fall of 1938, Radcliffe College sophomore Frances Turnbull sent her latest short story to family friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. His response, found in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (UK; public library)—the same volume that gave us Fitzgerald's heartwarming fatherly advice and his brilliantly acerbic response to hate mail—echoes Anaïs Nin's insistence upon the importance of emotional investment in writing and offers some uncompromisingly honest advice on essence of great writing:
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories 'In Our Time' went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In 'This Side of Paradise' I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he'll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is 'nice' is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the 'works.' You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn't seem worth while to analyze why this story isn't saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
Two years prior, in another letter to his 15-year-old daughter Scottie upon her enrollment in high school, Fitzgerald offered more wisdom on the promise and perils of writing:
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936
Dearest Scottina:
[...]
Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
[...]
Nothing any good isn't hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.
Scott
For more wisdom on the writing life, see Zadie Smith's 10 rules of writing, Kurt Vonnegut's 8 guidelines for a great story, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's 6 pointers, Neil Gaiman's 8 rules, Margaret Atwood's 10 practical tips, and Susan Sontag's synthesized learnings.
This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.
Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings. She writes for Wired UK and GOOD, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.
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F. 斯科特-菲茨杰拉德
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伟大写作的秘密是什么？对大卫-福斯特-华莱士来说，它是关于乐趣。对亨利-米勒来说，是关于发现。苏珊-桑塔格认为它是自我探索。许多文学大师把它与他们的日常工作联系起来。然而，答案仍然是难以捉摸和不断变化的。
1938年秋天，拉德克利夫学院的大二学生弗朗西斯-特恩布尔将她最新的短篇小说寄给了家庭朋友F-斯科特-菲茨杰拉德。他的回复见于《菲茨杰拉德。A Life in Letters》（英国；公共图书馆）--这本书给了我们菲茨杰拉德温暖人心的父亲式建议和他对仇恨邮件的精彩尖锐回应--呼应了安娜-宁对写作中情感投入的重要性的坚持，并对伟大写作的本质提出了一些毫不妥协的诚实建议。
