![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
If you’ve never read WH Auden’s views on the aspiring writer, reprinted recently in the London Times, that probably explains why you still think you are one. The photo alone should cure you of thoughts of a life spent writing.
A few choice quotes:
What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution.
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means that, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.
If you still want to write, then I’ve got some work to do.
Loading ...
H.L. Mencken had much the same thing to say about wannabes: he noted that it was always the child with no talents, no real ambitions, and nothing to say who invested in the typewriter and the specialty paper and planned to make a living as a writer. (I remember reading this to my ex-wife, and she completely lost it: of course, this was back when I was writing and she was on a slow boil over wanting to be a writer but being too willing to let television get in the way.)
Paul, your ex-wife sounds hot.
Thank you for this blog! There are mornings when I think, “Wow, today is a good day to write.” Then I read your blog while I drink my coffee, and such notions disappear. On the days you don’t post, I begin to weaken and make preliminary outlines for my 10 volume memoir set, my science-fiction/fantasy trilogy, and my pre-teen hi-lo series about an intrepid heroine (with freckles!) who overcomes middle-school adversity. Then, you return with some pithy bon-mots, and I get a grip.
If you still want to write, then I’ve got some work to do.
!
More reasons, please!!
Or I’ll start posting poetry at Toasted-Cheese!!!
Exclamation points abound the
Ineluctable Modality of the Whimsical
And hard of seeing/being/hearing & (3 dots pointing up triangular)reading.
#
Off topic:
I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture when it was printed in the New Yorker a few months back (?; could have been sooner or later: seems that all the weeks run together when I don’t have a real job). I liked this part:
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
What’s heartwarming and depressing about that is I see myself in the description. I’m just glad I tricked a woman I love into marrying me before I swore off friends altogether to pursue an art that hates me back.
Auden is Brad Pitt compared with some of these characters:
http://www.epdlp.com/paise.php?pais=EEUU
I’d still say that Auden is the Rondo Hatten of that rogue’s gallery. Anyone game to nominate the hottest?
Apart from the obvious setback that writers usually only achieve lasting fame after their lifetime … writers by necessity tend to spend a lot of time alone, hunched over a keyboard (or a quill). It’s not good for the skin.
I just did a Google image search on Rondo Hatton.
…
Eep.