Five Tips F. Scott Fitzgerald used to become a Timeless Writer
If there was a Mount Rushmore for great American authors, I am sure that Fitzgerald’s face would be the first to be carved. His The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the best books of all time and has been an unreachable standard for young writers everywhere.
In this continuation of my journey to become a better writer, I read several letters and articles by the Gatsby himself and distilled five main themes that drove his writing. They are listed below to be read at your pleasure.
Have a System
Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
When I first started writing, I believed that stories should grow organically. Start with a premise, setting, and some interesting characters, and see what happens. This wasted so much time. I kept having to go back and rewrite certain sections and chapters because they no longer fit where I wanted the book to go, an annoying task that caused me to procrastinate and lose valuable days of writing.
Spending time in the beginning to create the structure of your book not only safeguards against the worst of this time-wasting but also provides a framework for a schedule. Having something to measure how far you’ve come and keep you accountable to progress. If I had done even a few more weeks of outlining for Friday in Florence, it would have been released at least three months earlier.
Choose your word with care
You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade–where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think…. Exceptions: (a) need to avoid repetition (b) need of rhythm (c) etc.
Fitzgerald along with his friend and confidant Hemingway were known for using short, easily understood prose to describe profound and complicated subject matter. Their ability to create such complex stories that everyone from the average fourth-grader to an 80-year-old can understand is the mark of a master writer.
Also like Hemingway, Fitzgerald had a deep aversion to overusing adjectives in his stories.
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement–the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes.
All of this goes to show that one does not need a thesaurus to be a good writer. Use words people know, and use action over adjectives.
Kill your darlings
In a 1993 Saturday Evening Post article, Fitzgerald touches upon one of the hardest parts of writing.
“This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over.” The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional.
Learning to cut what is not needed in your writing, however well written it is, is something with which all writers struggle. I especially should have cut out more than I did in FiF. This dilemma has been more famously described as “killing your darlings,” a quote attributed to American greats like Faulkner and Wilde. It is the people who know how to do this, according to Fitzgerald, that separate the professionals from the amateurs.
Who to write for
“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
I’ll end this list with this. There is a lot of conflicting advice on how to direct your writing. Steinbeck says to write for one person. Publishers want you to write for a specific demographic, the one that will buy a lot of your books. Fitzgerald has a unique view that I haven’t seen in any other authors, one that I think is the reason that his books remain so timeless. Write for whomever you’d like, but understand that writing is a gift that can transcend lifetimes. Make sure that it lasts.