Writing As If You Were Dead - By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast

Hitch once wrote that "a serious person should try to write posthumously...one should compose as if the usual constraints?of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion?did not operate." The novelist Jeffrey Eugendies, speaking at an awards ceremony for young writers,?pivots off?that passage to offer advice for his audience:

All of the constraints Hitchens mentions have one thing in common: they all represent a deformation of the self.?

To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they?re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place. When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn?t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you?re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember? You were fifteen and standing beside a river in wintertime. Ice floes drifted slowly downstream. Your nose was running. Your wool hat smelled like a wet dog. Your dog, panting by your side, smelled like your hat. It was hard to distinguish. As you stood there, watching the river, an imperative communicated itself to you. You were being told to pay attention. You, the designated witness, special little teen-age omniscient you, wearing tennis shoes out in the snow, against your mother?s orders. Just then the sun came out from behind the clouds, revealing that every twig on every tree was encased in ice. The entire world a crystal chandelier that might shatter if you made a sound, so you didn?t. Even your dog knew to keep quiet. And the beauty of the world at that moment, the majestic advance of ice in the river, so like the progress of the thoughts inside your head, overwhelmed you, filling you with one desire and one desire only, which was to go home immediately and write about it.

Source: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/writing-and-the-practice-of-death.html

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