Tag Archives: Red Smith

04.23.24
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Story

Storyteller near Cairo (1878) by Wilhelm Gentz (German, 1822-1890). Public Domain.

What is a story?

A story can be almost anything. We are so much accustomed to telling stories, stories are so ingrained in our psychic and physical makeup, that storytelling and storyhearing can be said to be an essential component of human-ness. 

What is a good story? Ah, thereby hangs a tale.

Second Thoughts

“Where there is no vision,” observes the Book of Proverbs, “the people perish.” 

Vision. Jewish Rabbi Reading The Bible To His Family (1816), by Alexander Lauréus (Finnish, 1783 – 1823). Public Domain.

But vision is hard. 

Revision is easy. At least, I find it so. 

Once there is something substantive down on paper, I can see that something is wrong with it, and I can fix that. Then, I can see that something else is wrong with it, and I can fix that. Eventually, by a painstakingly iterative process, I can get it down to where it’s pretty good.

But getting something substantive down on paper in the first place: that’s the hard part.

Where does that first thing come from?

A Deep Well

Some people believe that inside each one of us, there is a deep well of creativity just waiting to be released as a bubbling fountain of expression.

I find that is true, but it’s hard to get it started. The more I write, the easier it comes. But the pump needs priming.

Writing every day helps, because then you can just continue whatever you were in the midst of writing yesterday. But sooner or later, you finish that project—at least, you finish the first draft. Then, it is ever so tempting to lose yourself in almost endless revisions. That’s a lot more fun.

Red Smith, sportswriter. Fair use.

Red Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” 

Perhaps you wonder, Gentle Reader, why Your New Favorite Writer bores you with all this drivel. 

Because I have to write something. That’s why. 

I keep telling myself that once I get the first draft out on the page, then I can revise it and revise it to the point where you’ll find it noble and inspirational. Or at least acceptable. 

Fellow writer Percy Dovetonsils. Public Domain.

“Aha! I’ve caught you out, O New Favorite Writer! You’re admitting, in black and white for all to see, that it’s all in the revision. In other words, writing the first draft is a mere formality. Perfectly trivial.”

Well, perhaps so, Dear Reader. But let me point out that if it were not for the every-Tuesday-morning character of this blog, I would not have written anything at all. Then where would my much-vaunted revision chops be, O Reader?

And it is the same across the board. I would not write this blog except for the deadline. I would not write a short story except for the need to prove I can write a short story. (The jury is still out.) I would not write a novel except for having gotten some screwball idea about a story I could tell in long form, and then feeling compelled to stick it through to the end.

“So, what are you kvetching about, O Writer? You impose all these deadlines and burdens on yourself.”

Yes, but complaining is half the joy.

Enough, Already

I’ll see you next week Fair Reader. After all, I’ve got a deadline.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.18.21
by

The Magic Well

Lord, save me from Creativity.

The Muses Clio, Euterpe, and Thalia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652-1655. Public Domain.

Writers know that when pen touches paper, magic happens. But if we have any sense we deny it. We do our best to ward it off. Far better to develop a craft—a set of skills that give us a place to go and a map to help us get there—than to blithely follow the Muse. 

So we plop our best writing pants in our best writing chair four hours each day. We bat out five hundred or five thousand words per session. We outline our story. We biograph our characters.

And, Lo! the magic happens. 

“Naturally,” we say, explaining: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” 

Ho hum.

Were we to admit that writing is what Red Smith said it is—sitting down at the typewriter, opening a vein, and letting it bleed—we would abandon the quest altogether, for few could bear sitting down to write with no surety that anything at all would come out.

We cling to our practical, scientific methods because we think they will at least yield a concatenation of words on paper. From there, it’s only a matter of revision.

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash.

When something halts the magic, even when something blocks the flow of those humble superstitions we use to summon the magic, we plunge into despair. We can’t get the juicy stuff out of writing, because we can’t even rattle the dry bones from which the magic is to sprout.

Last week I went to the hospital and got my left hip replaced. I have been through this with my right hip, and, earlier, with both knees. The surgery is traumatic but not beyond endurance. The problem it causes for a working writer is the operating room anesthesia and the opioid drugs prescribed for post-surgical pain. These divine formulae wipe out, for days, the mind’s ability to concentrate. 

Nothing now impedes the fresh flow of literary magic. But an ineffable fuzziness keeps my brain from forming a few simple sentences to get the ball rolling. I’m stuck.

There is nothing to do but wait it out. Sooner or later the drugs will wear off.

I am still waiting. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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