"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." ...
