Monday Morning Writing Motivation
If you are born with the yen to write you can’t start too early.
—Benjamin De Casseres
Writing is a fickle skill. When it's easy, you can't stop doing it; when it's hard, it's all you can think about. Sometimes you pick up a pen and just start scratching away. Other times, you can hold a pen in hand for hours without touching the page.
Over the last couple years, one of my inspirations for writing has been Benjamin De Casseres. I ran across him while working on a paper that I delivered at the Mythmoot II conference in Baltimore. Since then, I've become quite obsessed with him.
His epigrammatic writing style is nothing if not unique. During the forty-five years of his active writing life, he amassed accolades from a wide variety of authors: H. L. Mencken, Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, to name a few.
The thing that impresses me most about De Casseres is the sheer output. He wrote from about 1899 until his death in 1945, and during that time he never stopped writing. The words just came out of him. He wrote book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, poetry, short stories, books, pamphlets, and so much more. And his correspondence was epic! I've managed to collect literally thousands of his works through digital newspaper, magazine, and book archives, and I feel like I've only barely scratched the surface.
How did he do it? I've often asked myself. I don't know; all I know is that he did it. I have to assume he had the same struggles as any other writer, with blocks and dead ends and aborted works that have never seen the light of day. But through it all he kept going.
And so do I. Not nearly with the same level of success or output as De Casseres had – he wrote for the Big Three papers in New York City (the Times, the Herald and the Sun at a time when Hearst and Pulitzer were soundly beating the world with their yellow journalism (proto-clickbait, as I like to call it). I don't ever expect to match his output, but with a little effort, hopefully I can at least feel like I accomplished something.
What motivates you to write?
Background Image Source: Pixabay
Quote from De Casseres' The March of Events column, Feb. 12, 1940
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I agree. Also, I think that by just sitting down and writing anyone who has the time and determination, today, can match the output of the great writers in the 17th thru 20th centuries.---Key word is CAN. There is hope. In the late 20th century it was very difficult to do this.---But today, thanks to new emerging communications infrastructure and productivity increasing tools and lowering costs of publishing. (Steemit, for instance!) In the past, the great writers didn't work, wrote all day, because most were wealthy or life essentials were inexpensive. Then life essentials rose in cost and bureaucracy increased. Publishing costs remained about the same. So there was a decline in opportunities to write. Now, the last few years, the cost of publishing is falling fast enough to more than compensate for that and we are seeing a greater written output!