I’ve known some people who always seem to be content with life, who tend to think things are perfectly fine as they are.
I don’t know any writers this way.
Not that writers have it so bad. Sure, there are stereotypes of the depressive and possibly alcoholic writer, the Edgar Alan Poes, the Charles Bukowskis, the Sylvia Plaths: the tortured artists and souls, a category that seems to loom larger in legend than in practice. Most writers I know aren’t that bad off by any means, and in fact you could probably take most of them home to your mom.
But there has to be a pretty intense fire burning inside you to devote the amount of time to write a book that it takes to write one. Spending hundreds of hours engaged in a multi-month mental marathon is not usually an act for the perfectly content at heart.
And that’s before you consider the odds.
Writing itself is a form of striving: of striving to be heard, striving for something more than the ordinary life, and, if the writer is honest, there’s probably an element of material striving as well, whether for money or recognition or both.
Writing is an act of getting down on your hands and knees and pushing on the ground and hoping the world spins on a slightly different axis. It’s the art of not taking life for granted and trying to make something, anything change.
That’s partly why we love it, right?
And I don’t know if any writer quite wrote and lived the art of writing and striving as F. Scott Fitzgerald did.
Fitzgerald lived the life of a striver. When Zelda Sayre refused to marry him because she was concerned he couldn’t provide for her, he got back to work writing and the result was This Side of Paradise, a sensation published when he was just 23 years old. He was always trying to be something more.
Of course, Fitzgerald created perhaps the ultimate striver of them all, Jay Gatsby, someone whose entire life was built on fiction, from his name (nee James Gatz), to his always shifting and unknowable biography (he professed to be from the Midwestern city of San Francisco), to the narrative he constructed around his affair with Daisy Buchanan. His life rested on layer upon layer of fiction.
And like Gatsby, writing itself is built around striving and dreams and a world conjured from thin air in the hope that it’s enough. It’s that feeling that Gatsby had of being just a few sequences of events away from having those dreams coming true, as close as the green light on the dock, so close you can “hardly fail to grasp them.”
But when those dreams recede before us, as Fitzgerald wrote in the greatest page of them all, “that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning ā So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
And then we get back to work.
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"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
One of my favorite lines in literature.
And then F. Scott went to Hollywood. And hung out with Hemingway at the Ritz Bar in Paris.
You've written many beautiful things before, but just fyi, this post shows why you have become a published writer as well.
But I agree. You can't write unless there's some sort of yearning inside you, trying to claw its way out. You have to be reaching for something, even if it's just to form the words. Otherwise, there's no passion nor any devotion.
And that particular line of Fitzgerald's is one of the most gorgeous things he ever wrote.
So, I am a high school English teacher and I, just today, showed a bio of Fitzgerald. I have been teaching Fitzgerald since I started teaching. Sure he was a striver – and then is the great theme of all his novels – but so is the realization that it is false – this optimism – this belief in the greatest possibilites. You shrug off the miserably destructive writer archetyles at the beginning of your post, but Fitzgerald was destroyed by his habits. After Gatsby, it all went downhill for him and his wife, so far and so fast that the prior years seem just like the lost dreams of Jay Gatsby or Dexter Green. Overly optimistic, propelled by a bit of luck, and then sunk by the ancient truth that fate + choice + flaw = Tragedy. That is the reality Fitzgerald lived. And no – I don't pitch to my students that way. But as a writer – I can not and will not romanticize Fitzgerald. He was a Modernist and the Moderns are all about Disillusion baby.
Great post! I just loved it!
Fitzgerald was a human-type person first, a writer second. He was a striver, also a struggler. He possessed all of the foibles and carried most of the crosses of your average humanoid. Early success and a crazy wife probably not the least of them. What he did differently, though, is write an incredible little book that is so perfectly compressed, as well as so magically beautiful, it can only serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to write. (It's also written in the most difficult POV – first person interested bystander. Don't think so? Try it.)
Lovely post, Nathan.
Never thought of it as striving but I like the analogy and do agree with it. Just wish I'd strive a little less in some areas, like trying to keep the house clean in the midst of striving to get that next story together.
Thanks for another POV on this topic š
Joanna Aislinn
Dream. Believe. Strive. Achieve!
NO MATTER WHY
The Wild Rose Press
http://www.joannaaislinn.com
http://www.joannaaislinn.wordpress.com
Ah, Mr. Former Agent Man: it's posts like this that kept me hoping someday to impress you with a query.
And now, to find out you work for a company related to Scribners, the publishing house by which I always wanted to be published, specifically because of its glorious history as Charles Scribner's and then Charles Scribner's & Sons under editor Maxwell Perkins of publishing the "new voices" of its time, including Fitzgerald who, unfortunately, had financial aspirations far greater than earnings–am currently reading a bio on him and am stunned to hear after Paradise and before Gatsby, he couldn't possibly live on less than $36,000 a year which at the time was tantamount to something like $360,000, with a purchasing power especially in post-war France far greater…
I harken to a great tradition of striving. I truly believe the writer, as an artist, has to go way out, where no one can help him or her, trying to push the edges of understanding yet be able to come back and convey meaning.
I aim to write novels that will be read and understood and hopefully enjoyed 100 years or more from now.
How's that for striving?
Repeating the words of beloved former agent Ray Puechner to me when I was young and hungry and whined about it taking too long in my personal timeline to be published and lauded as he'd suggested I might: "who ever told you this was going to be easy?"
Heck. If it were easy, everybody'd be doing it, right? š
'Tomorrow we will run faster.' So THAT'S where your wife got the slogan for her blog!
I haven't read 'The Great Gatsby' for years, so I perhaps remember the movies more than the book, both the faithful Robert Redford version, and the truncated and less well-known Alan Ladd version.
I love observer/narrators. Nick Carraway is possibly the third most famous observer/narrator, after Dr. Johnson's Boswell and Sherlock Holmes' Watson. My WIP's young protagonist is an observer-narrator of others' adventures, along with his own.
Readers may be interested to know Nathan has started a thread about THE GREAT GATSBY in the ALL THINGS BOOKS section of the Forums.
BTW, Nathan, if you're going to continue in this philosophical vein you lack one important thing, which I have. A beard. Trust me on this this.
Enjoyed the post. Very inspiring and very true. Thanks.
A couple years ago American Masters did a very good documentary on Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams," which you can watch on YouTube.
Good article Nathan, however I was hugely disappointed by The Great Gatsby. I think it's one of the most over-rated novels in literature.
Americans seem to love it, because it reveals the falsehoods of the Great American Dream but the rest of us already know that life is disappointing and utopia is but a pipe dream.
Give me Tolstoy or Kerouac or Bukowksi anyday. Therein lies the actual truth.
Writing is an act of getting down on your hands and knees and pushing on the ground and hoping the world spins on a slightly different axis. It's the art of not taking life for granted and trying to make something, anything change.
Great quote!
beautiful post . . .
YES
It is right that we strive for something and I might add that it's something shapeless, but absolute that carries dreams of a better life.
Sir, you understand the struggle of the writing life very well. Better than I.
Writers are always writing,even if only in the constant barrage of words,phrases and story ideas bombarding their minds,awake or asleep.The ideas never stop.
We are always striving for that one perfect idea,the concept that will get us published and propel us into the A list of authors. Maybe it never happens,but do we give up.A true writer can't not write and will continue to write ,hopefully, better stories in the hopes of catching and agent or a publishers attention.
But until that dream is realized,or even if it doesn't a true writer will continue to write and strive for that one great story.
Good point, worth mulling over.
AMAZING post Nathan! I just finished rereading The Great Gatsby for class, so it was great to read this post with the novel still fresh in my mind. I love how you quoted the closing lines of the novel in reference to writing… very inspiring! So inspiring that I'm going to get back to work, right now.
I've stopped commenting on blogs to save my energy for my WIP, over which I'm currently obesessing. But this post was too cool for me not to reply. Bravo. Now I'm off to strive to craft the perfect sentence.
Fred
I came to this post from Five Star Friday and you really nailed how I feel about writing. Beautiful post.
I really loved this post! Very timely – have never read the book but saw the film last night. Beautifully expressed thoughts and after leaving the cinema feeling emotionally "cold" it made me think about the story in a different way. The comparison with writers and striving and the human condition also thought-provoking. Thank you!
You made a great point. And thank you for helping me see this book in this light . . . I dislike it a little less b/c of you today.
(But I still don't really like it. I prefer striving for better while actually seeing the world you really live in.)