Tag: writing

The relationship between some writers and their illness is difficult to explain. A normal person, without the slightest discomfort, can find all the excuses he needs not to write. If he suffers from an illness, there is nothing to say. So we see not one, not two, but many writers who have not only persevered with their illness for months, years or a lifetime, but who have made the illness itself a source of motivation. This is no small feat, and it is not easy to imagine. There are illnesses that one never gets used to, but it seems that these are the ones that trap you and leave you with no other option.

Some writer once made the wise recommendation: one work at a time. And there is no doubt that concentrating the mind on a single piece of work can only speed it up, intensify it and be of great benefit to creation. But is it possible to stick to this rule? Perhaps with prose. With poetry, however, the situation changes, and when the planned verses exceed a few hundred, the mind seems to beg for an escape valve into which it can pour lines and lines and experience the relief of fluidity. Without this valve, soon the unproductivity, added to the ideas that accumulate in a closed deposit, begin to torture. For the poet, practicing prose seems psychologically essential.

It is characteristic of many authors that they express themselves with restraint, more by suggesting than by actually expressing what they want. In some cases, the suggestion certainly works, and perhaps says more than direct expression could. But this technique, if always employed, results in a vice that harms the author even more than the work. It is a vice that, whenever the verb is born inflamed in the mind, rejects its inflamed expression on paper. And so it is as if the author were forbidden certain ways of speaking. It is not just an obvious limitation, but the deprivation of extremely important artistic experiences: once the writer breaks all ties and forces his spirit to express what he wants with maximum intensity, he will realize that there, in the act of creation, something different has happened; but, above all, he will realize that, by concentrating entirely and sincerely on this, something different always happens.

The shock I suffered after first reading Crime and Punishment, probably the most decisive of my entire life, was largely due to the realization that what Dostoevsky did in Crime and Punishment was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, both in and out of literature, and to the realization of the immense nobility of this attempt. Doing something like that, I concluded, justifies and dignifies an existence. And what Dostoevsky and some other authors do is so different that today, more than a decade on from that first impression, I realize that time has done nothing but reinforce it. A book like Crime and Punishment will never emerge from the pen of someone who simply wants to tell a story. That is why it is so natural for me to read Joseph Frank’s lines revealing that, after a dramatic combination of circumstances, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother saying that, from that moment on, the aim of his life would be to study the meaning of life and man. Without this conscious resolution, he would never have been able to come close to what he did.