by Ron Clinton Smith

“The first requirement for any piece of writing is that it must be alive.”  ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If you bore yourself, you bore others,” a comedian friend told me years ago. It was true of the very off the wall stand-up we were doing at the time, and I’ve lived by it both as a writer and actor since. If what you’re doing isn’t breathing, throbbing, kicking, illuminating, practically exploding off the page and in your brain, what’s the point of doing it in the first place, and why would anyone want to watch or read it? It has to be alive. It has to inhale and exhale, with all of nature’s inherent flaws, warts, blemishes, massively beautiful imperfections that rub us all kinds of ways and remind us just how unbearably alive we are.

For this reason I’m drawn to writers who shake the dust off of old tomes and bring a whirlwind through their writing, and the sun’s blinding glare. The kind of writing that lifts you, makes you see and feel, because you know damn well they do and they’re showing it to you. Not only do you not have trouble getting into it, you can’t get out of it, or get it out of your dreams. Long after you read it or see it, it’s living in your brain like some seductive disease that carries you back from time to time to read it or watch it again. Ezra Pound said: “Good writing is news that stays news.” It doesn’t matter how many times you go back to it, it’s going to grab you, because it is alive.

I’d been writing for years when I wrote my novel, Creature Storms. As I got into it I determined not to get in the way of what the characters thought, did, or said, regardless of what it was. I’m going to let them have their say, I thought, let them hang it all out there on the line, no matter how embarrassing or uncomfortable, how strange it sounds, how much it might reveal about me personally. This is the only chance they have to live, so don’t hold them back, don’t impose your morals or limits on them. If they are profane, crazy, odd, whoever they are, put them down word for word, don’t censor or edit them while It’s flowing. Let them have their life, in other words, and don’t judge it. Later on in revision, if it’s too much, if you think they said too much, if they went too far, you can always pull it back, tone it down, or even cut it; but to begin with, let these people live.

When I went back to it later, some of the boldest, wildest, and out there things I’d written were the best things in the book. They were the raw stuff, they were all me and no one else: it was shockingly alive. I believe when we’re writing our best, most tapped in, subconscious work, we’re living where the essence of art is, and when I looked at scenes I’d written in an almost blind, visionary flurry, it was me, all right, but a part of me I hardly recognized; it was a revelation, which I believe is the primary purpose of art at its truest.

In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast he recounts a conversation between himself and another young writer in a Paris café about Dostoyevsky’s writing. Some of the writing’s so bad, so awful, so overwritten, but it’s so good, and there’s really no one better, he says. Which makes this great and tortured and afflicted 19th century Russian writer one of the best in any language.

Dostoevsky’s writing is probably the most personally revealing of anyone in  modern literature, and consequently the most alive. His characters confess their unbearable self-doubt and self-loathing, failures, humiliations, passions that make you cringe, fears and obsessions and failures, as well as joys, laying it all out there passionately, in speeches like floods that break your heart and scare you and tie you to his humanity and humility in a way that is jarring at times. Where you might be embarrassed for his revelations, he’s giving us flesh and blood unforgettable characters and life to a degree no one else has except maybe Shakespeare. His work is more alive a 150 years later than most writers’ today, because he held nothing back, and wrote it in a headlong rush and avalanche of blinding and purifying confession. Time and culture and manners haven’t toned it down or tamed it; it burns off the page, sweats, bleeds, cries, haunts your dreams much in the way Van Gogh’s paintings do. There is a similarity between Dostoyevsky’s writing and Van Gogh’s paintings: once you’ve seen them, you’re never quite the same. They aren’t just representing life: they are alive.

So when choosing something to write about, make sure it matters enough to you to bring it to life. If it won’t leave you alone, if you can’t shake it, no matter what it is, it’s yours to write. It chose you. And that’s the one to go after. And when you do, don’t inhibit it even a little bit, because it may be too outlandish. If you have the impulse, if it speaks to you, put it down even if it seems farfetched at first. In the first draft, when no one is watching but you, let it fly, give it freedom, don’t judge it or think about it with that critical, self-doubting part of your brain. Just say it, throw it out there to the Great Unknown. And when you go back to look at it, you may be surprised that some of the best writing you’ve ever done will be that unleashed, uncensored wild animal you sent bolting into the wilderness. Writing that is alive.