Simultaneously, others have fostered the notion among the more self-conscious literary that quill, some parchment, an idle hour in midday, a soupcon of ink daintily tapped on paper will suffice, given inspiration's whiff. Said inspiration being, all too often, the latest issue of The Kenyon Review or some other literary quarterly. A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and – voila! we are the Creator! Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!
Nothing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive than the two attitudes above.
Why?
Because both are a form of lying.
It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.
It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.
Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim the literary quarterlies are with young lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when all they are doing is imitating the scrolls and flourishes of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Jack Kerouac?
Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim are our women's magazines and other mass circulation publications with yet other lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when they are only imitating Clarence Buddington Kelland, Anya Seton, or Sax Rohmer?
The avant-garde liar kids himself he will be remembered for his pedantic lie.
The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that!
Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers them lies one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn't know an Idea if it came up and bit them.
We hear a lot about slanting for the commercial market, but not enough about slanting for the literary cliques. Both approaches, in the final analysis, are unhappy ways for a writer to live in this world. No one remembers, no one brings up, no one discusses the slanted story, be it diminuendoed Hemingway or third-timearound Elinor Glyn.
What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!"
Then and only then is writing worthwhile.
Quite suddenly the pomposities of the intellectual fadists fade to dust. Suddenly, the agreeable monies collected from the fatadvertising magazines are unimportant.
The most callous of commercial writers loves that moment.
The most artificial of literary writers lives for that moment.
And God in his wisdom often provides that moment for the most money-grubbing of hacks or the most attention-grabbing of literateurs.
For there comes a time in the day's occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself.
So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house.
Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth?
Let me haul out my signs again.
WORK
It's quite obvious that both men were working.
And work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?
RELAXATION
And then the men are happily following my last advice:
DON'T THINK
Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity.
Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck?
It can be done. It is done, every day of every week of every year.
Athletes do it. Painters do it. Mountain climbers do it. Zen Buddhists with their little bows and arrows do it.
Even I can do it.
And if even I can do it, as you are probably hissing now, through clenched teeth, you can do it, too!
All right, let's line up the signs again. We could put them in any order, really. RELAXATION or DON'T THINK could come first, or simultaneously, followed by WORK But, for convenience let's do it this way, with a fourth developmental sign added:
WORK RELAXATION DON'T THINK FURTHER RELAXATION
Shall we analyze word number one?
WORK
You have been working, haven't you?
Or do you plan some sort of schedule for yourself starting as soon as you put down this article?
What kind of schedule?
Something like this. One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.
For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
How so?
Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, Tintoretto's billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.
A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count-with a living creature under his knife.
An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards.
Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration.
The artist learns what to leave out.
The surgeon knows how to go directly to the source of trouble, how to avoid wasted time and complications.
The athlete learns how to conserve power and apply it now here, now there, how to utilize this muscle, rather than that.
Is the writer different? I think not.
His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.
The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
So with the surgeon whose hand at last, like the hand of da Vinci, must sketch lifesaving designs on the flesh of man.
So with the athlete whose body at last is educated and becomes, of itself, a mind.
By work, by quantitative experience, man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand.
The artist must not think of the critical rewards or money he will get for painting pictures. He must think of beauty here in this brush ready to flow if he will release it.
The surgeon must not think of his fee, but the life beating under his hands.
The athlete must ignore the crowd and let his body run the race for him.
The writer must let his fingers run out the story of his characters, who, being only human and full of strange dreams and obsessions, are only too glad to run.