Famous Advice on Writing
The collected wisdom of great writers, including Vonnegut, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Kerouac, Atwood, Steinbeck, and more:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald on emotional investment as the secret of good writing
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s advice on writing, in a letter to his 15-year-old daughter.
Oh hello there, F. Scott Fitzgerald in drag, 1916.
But don’t criticize, for Fitzgerald knows how to respond to hate mail.
A lonely F. Scott Fitzgerald sends himself a postcard, a postal stunt outshone only by the Englishman who mailed himself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald reads Shakespeare. Also see: Fitzgerald responds to hate mail.
The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois — men of thought, mind you, ‘impractical’ men, ‘idealist’ have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would’ve been 116 today, responds to hate mail accusing his work of being too impractical and out of touch with the “real people” who “create business and politics.”
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
What Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of The Great Gatsby. For an equally poetic complement, see 18-year-old Plath on loving everybody and living with curiosity.
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
Audio excerpt from The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four, F. Scott Fitzgerald
