Prevented by a Good Teacher

Recently, my aunt, who lives in Alabama, emailed me to ask if she had missed one of my blogs. The last one she had, she said, was from March. I told her no, that indeed, the March one was the last one written. She then asked, although she said she did not think it was the case, if I was suffering from “writer’s block.” Well, there is a sense in which that’s true, but not the ordinary block, not the one she meant, the one in which a writer’s creative output slows down or even stops due to a number of different psychological factors like fear of failure, perfectionism, burnout, that sort of thing. The “block,” in my case, was not a noun but, rather, a verb. 

One of my favorite short-story writers is Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor was a prominent American author known for her Southern Gothic style and wonderful short stories. She was known for her meticulous standards and often spoke about the importance of self-editing. When discussing her relatively small output, it’s fitting to recall the sentiment, often attributed to writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.’ She believed in discarding what she considered poor writing. I think that was a wonderful approach. Not everything we think needs to be said, much less written down, saved for posterity.

O’Connor died in 1964. She was only thirty-nine. I want to share a quote from her that reflects more of her thinking about writing and displays her piquant style as well.

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.”

–Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose “The Nature and Aims of Fiction” (1969).

There is a lot to marvel at in this quotation: irony, a sense of humor, and a real understanding that many people who write shouldn’t. They are, in her words, “shiftless,” that is, lazy, idle, and sluggish. I often feel that I am not really a writer but rather, as O’Connor describes the type, one “merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.” I often feel that if I’m born anything, it’s a born reader. And that’s a good thing, at least for me, a true blessing.

I do write, though. In addition to blogging, from time to time, I have also written some poetry and short stories. If you’ve read my blogs before, you may know that Frost is my ideal poet; to my mind, his work is the perfect fusion of form and content. Frost believed that a poem has to be both well-crafted and necessary in its message. One of his well-known quotes on this subject is: “A poem… begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.” [Letter to Louis Untermeyer, January 1, 1916].

These words capture Frost’s belief that poetry must emerge from a deep, genuine feeling or necessity. But poetry is more than that, more than a feeling. It’s words, words that, in Frost’s view, must have form. The “lump in the throat” must be crafted into words. In an interview in 1959, Frost said, “I’ve given offense by saying I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.” For Frost, not only should a poem arise from something that urgently needs to be expressed, but it must also be technically proficient; a poet should know, follow, and break the rules as necessary.

To me, all writing should be like this: something that needs to be said and, when said, said well. It doesn’t matter if it’s an advertisement, a set of instructions, a newspaper article, a blog, a poem, a story, or a novel. If it fails on either of these two points, there is always the wastebasket. Thank goodness!

All the best,
Gershon