What Few Young Writers Realize
“Artists never thrive in colonies.”
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
—Henry Miller
If you’ve been following this page for some time now you’ve probably noticed that I’m a huge Henry Miller fan. His writings cut deep and though his novels are great I’m more drawn to his nonfiction works. There’s hardly any subject that Miller can’t strip to the bone and write poetically about. One of my favorite of his books is Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch where he writes about the 15 years he lived on the California coast with very little to his name.
From the publisher:
”Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children, and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks, and the unclassifiable, like Conrad Moricand, the Devil in Paradise, who is one of Miller's greatest character studies.
Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book - the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.”
Today I wanted to share with you a passage Miller wrote on what few young writers realize while pursuing their art. It’s fire. Hope you enjoy it.
What few young writers realize, it seems to me, is that they must find—create, invent!—the way to reach their readers. It isn’t enough to write a good book, a beautiful book, or even a better book than most.
It isn’t enough even to write an “original” book! One has to establish, or re-establish, a unity which has been broken and which is felt just as keenly by the reader, who is a potential artist, as by the writer, who believes himself to be an artist.