![]() My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Click image for more.Įchoing Voltaire’s memorable admonition from his letter of advice on how to write well - “beware, lest in attempting the grand, you overshoot the mark and fall into the grandiose” - and Bukowski’s lament that “bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt,” Strayed adds: Illustration by Kris Di Giacomo from ‘Enormous Smallness’ by Mathhew Burgess a picture-book biography of E.E. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I was two months pregnant with my first child. I had turned thirty-five a few weeks before. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. In short, I had to gain the self-knowledge that Flannery O’Connor mentions in that quote… And once I got there I had to make a hard stop at self-knowledge’s first product: humility.ĭo you know what that is, sweat pea? To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. With an eye to Flannery O’Connor’s famous proclamation that “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” which Strayed had inscribed across the chalkboard in her living room at the time, she writes: Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was “lazy and lame,” Strayed recounts how she “finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked” in other words, she got off the nail. This is exactly what she hands to Bassist, under the title “Write Like a Motherfucker.” What makes Strayed’s advice so vitalizing is that it is never dispensed as a holier-than-thou dictum rather, it weaves tapestry of no-bullshit solace from the beautifully tattered threads of her own experience, messy and alive. Like all the letters Strayed answered as Sugar, this one is profoundly personal yet speaks to the artist’s universal dance with the fear - the same paralyzing self-doubt which Virginia Woolf so elegantly captured which led Steinbeck to repeatedly berate, then galvanize himself in his diary which sent Van Gogh into a spiral of floundering before he found his way as an artist. Among the thousands of Dear Sugar letters she received was one from a self-described “pathetic and confused young woman of twenty-six” named Elissa Bassist, a “writer who can’t write,” a “high-functioning head case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth.” “The truth,” she tells Sugar, “ I am sick with panic that I cannot - will not - override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” Long before Wild - her magnificent memoir of learning, oh, just about every dimension of the art of living while hiking more than a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail - was turned into a major motion picture, Strayed wielded her art as an advice columnist for The Rumpus, simply known as Sugar. ![]() That uncomfortable yet strangely emboldening counsel is what Cheryl Strayed offers - with greater poeticism and much better grammar - to a despairing young writer in Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar ( public library), the ample soul-satisfactions of which have been previously extolled here. ![]() Scott Fitzgerald asserted in his letter of advice on writing to his fifteen-year-old daughter upon her enrollment in high school.
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