I was thinking last night about my much-loved F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while I was browsing the Interwebs, overly concerned with something extremely unimportant, indeed, I was led to the following thought...
F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been a writer known for severe and lasting bouts of writer's block. This very characteristic is what makes me respect the man more than anything. I always hope that somehow, I have a genius waiting to get out on paper too. He and I have dealt with writer's block in much the same way, except he had a Gatsby, and several hundred other delightful tidbits to show for himself. Maybe someday, I could be even a tiny fraction as good...
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. " -- F.S.F.
But, what, dare I ask, would have happened to American literature if the Internet would have been around sooner? Would Hemingway have been too busy playing a FPS on his XBox360 and never written The Old Man and the Sea. Maybe he would have written The Old Man and the TV. Would Melville have been too busy playing FISH: the Flash Game to have ever written an actual novel about the subject? Would Dorothy Parker have been updating her blog once a day and never ACTUALLY written any stories? Fitzgerald sat around drinking highballs and writing lists in order to cope with his writer's block, but what if he had just written lists AND played Sims? What "great American novels" are WE failing to breathe into life because we have too many useless things to do and therefore too little time to do them all?
I have thought though...Oscar Wilde would have had a subscription to GQ, and would idolize Justin Timberlake.
This is the biggest worry we had about Fitzgerald...
"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." -- F.S.F.
All writers have suffered from writer's block, that looming and evil disease, but that fact makes me all the more encouraged when I hear it from them, in the shadow of their great works of art...
"One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily."
(Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
"People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently."
(Anna Quindlen)
"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."
(Margaret Atwood)
"Don't get it right, just get it written."
(James Thurber)
"Lower your standards and keep writing."
(William Stafford)
"I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."
(William Faulkner)
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule."
(Robert Parker)
You have to kind of laugh at the irony of writing about the evils of the internet on your blog.
ReplyDeleteI readily admit to the claims I make...I guess that's my point. What great American literature will never be written by us because of the Internet? I vote there is a lot...unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteWell, I DO most certainly see your point, and even wrote a paper to that effect, there are also examples of ways technology has assisted storytelling. Did you know that Richard Powers doesn't type his stories? He speaks them into a notebook and the voice recognition software types it out for him! How crazy is that?! He has basically taken story telling back to its original oral tradition! Plus, his prose is BEAUTIFUL probably because he gets to HEAR it before it hits the page, allowing him to fine tune the very sound of his story. Oral stories all have a very lyrical quality to them because they are spoken often and the storyteller is able to focus on sound alone.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm not saying that myspace isn't some kind of plague or that the internet hasn't corrupted young minds and shortened attention spans for the worst, I'm just saying that technology can have its upsides as well.
(And I wasn't trying to dismiss your claims, I just kind of loved the irony and thought you'd appreciate it as well.)
Oh I don't really think the Internet is particularly evil, I guess I was just analyzing the simplicity of the classic American prose and realizing how different it is from the choppy, to-the-point, scene-cutting fiction we see now... Also, I recall the urgency of creating GOOD fiction and I have realized that that aim has somewhat diminished in recent years. It's truly detrimental, I think. Hopefully our children will be able to read GOOD literature from our generation and we won't see a distinct and permanent cut-off where literature stopped.
ReplyDelete♠reader.
ReplyDeleteNow, for me, they were just really annoying. However, like you, I like to read a LOT of books, and I am split between "serious" and popular fiction. Which basically means one day I'll be reading "Mansfield Park" and the next I'm reading "World War Z" (great book by the way). So my little brain synapses are used to the longer bouts of complex prose. That, and I get bored with the internet. I'll hope on, check out a small handful of friend's and their blogs, and then I'll hope off and read. It really doesn't hold my attention. So I spend more time reading long prose than I do reading the electronic snippets. All of this basically means that MOST modern novels, at least the choppy ones, simply annoy me since they keep hopping away from the one or two characters I actually like to tell me something I don't need to know about a character who is hardly even connected to the plot.
Anyway, all this means is, I totally agree with you! I think we just have to wait for whatever apocalypse is heading our way to wipe out the machines and then storytelling will reset to the oral tradition and maybe we can start getting some better prose. :-)
Now, I am off to read "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. "The Road" was a very good book, so I'm looking forward to this one. :-) OH, and I highly suggest a book called "I Am A Cat". It's by a very popular Japanese writer and it's about a very philosophical cat. It's an entertaining little read.
Hmmm, one interesting observation that you made that was also made in my class. Fiction nowadays seems to be patterned more after movies than previous novels. You said "scene cutting", which is what reminded me. A lot of the modern books I read this semester had a very movie scene feel to them, especially the way they would cut away or show flashbacks. It would seem we already have a form of oral storytelling through movies, it's just an oral telling with visuals, which I feel takes away from the listener's imagination, which is probably what is killing the novel for younger generations since their imaginations are no longer allowed to develop. They are plunked down in front of a television at an early age and everything is handed to them. I wonder how many kids play the pretend games we used to play, or if they have been stripped of that privilege completely. I would argue that the evil invention of our time isn't the internet but the television.