A letter from F. Scott
Fitzgerald to his daughter Scottie, on writing.
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story
carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a
good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell
your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only
touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This
is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the
tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique
which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to
sell.
This is the experience
of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the
child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his
whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down
to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In ‘This Side of
Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the
skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the
professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a
trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized
girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the
same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to
another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your
first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to
see.
That, anyhow, is the
price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides
or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to
decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from
the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You
wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it
doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too
fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you
ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I might say that
the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and
charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the
right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
Here’s a second letter,
sent to Scottie, when she was 15 years old and had just entered high
school.
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936
Dearest Scottina:
Don’t be a bit discouraged
about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage
you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you
have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever
became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say,
anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so
desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found
before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one
matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for
one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a
new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little
astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that
they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to
express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the
thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted
you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it
knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
Nothing any good isn’t
hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on
me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up
absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning. Scott
