Write What you Won't Say

Gabriel Matula--Unsplash

Never since Guttenberg dreamed of mass producing the bible has it been so easy for us to be writers. We no longer need reams of typewriter paper or magic white-out strips to build a manuscript. Gone are literary agents and writing clubs. We have Grammarly, Pro Writing Aide, and Hemingway to help us produce syntactically correct writing. Facebook puts us in close contact with other writers. So, answer me this. With all the help we can access;  with the world at our fingertips why do we produce so much shit? Why are so many published writers illiterate?  During a recent college symposium dealing with two English Authors, George Orwell, and D. H. Lawrence, no one knew when Orwell wrote and published 1984. 15 people in a graduate writing class could not answer the question which tells you that Orwell's life was an unknown to these creative writing students. Orwell transposed the year he wrote 1984 to create the title. The book was written in 1948, published in 1949 and he died in 1950. When asked which was written first, 1984 or Animal Farm, there was no real discussion, only guessing. 


In discussing Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence most students felt it was of little consequence and rather boring.  This book changed sexual morality in both England and the Americas. It was the first book to map sex with love, and to treat fucking as both serious emotion and even more serious descriptive writing. What makes both writers stand as towering examples of our art?  What skill did these two titans of literature have that we so lack?

Neither author was a rebel or anarchist. Neither attempted to burn Parliament nor did they curse the Royal family. They each burned with ideas not shared nor commonly held. Like us, they did not get on a soapbox or climb the roof of a building to proclaim their beliefs. 

In 1952  Ralph Ellison wrote The Invisible Man.  Only a black man could write that book. Whites could neither understand nor embrace it; not then, and not today. Ellison, Orwell, and Lawrence all had emotions that burned their souls.

What they accomplished was not realized until the middle 1960s when Harlan Ellison wrote: “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. This story is one of the first dystopian nightmares to hit the written page, and we as writers need to embrace the scream within us. 

As writers, we seem to be bent on pursuing the ever elusive muse and once found we still often fight writer's block. The muse is a bitch, a wolf wanting only to gnaw at our creativity.  Kick her/him/it to the curb.

Feel this:

''I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix''

If it moves you and you’ve never heard it before, it is the opening lines of HOWL by Allen Ginsberg. If you’ve heard of neither, you have a moral obligation to change the education system so your children will feel what real creativity can do to you and for you.  Even if you’ve read it before, read it again. Read it now. It's free, and it’s right here: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.

We need to scream. We have ideas and we feel emotions that others think exist but do not pursue. Stop running. If you have nothing of value to scream, if you enjoy living in ennui, stop writing. If, in your soul is a message you need to get out; something you must share then write.  As you write you have the God-given right to throw back your head and scream whatever burns in you.