How to Get Creatively Unstuck: A Lesson from Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer | Big Think
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- Опубликовано: 1 сен 2016
- How to Get Creatively Unstuck: A Lesson from Novelist
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Author Jonathan Safran Foer on the two surprising qualities successful writers need. Here are two things you never thought a writer would need - agility and stamina. American author Jonathan Safran Foer (the literary talent behind works such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything Is Illuminated, Eating Animals) knows writing and therefore he knows writer’s block. The feeling of being stuck can strike in any creative field. Safran Foer points out that often it feels like it’s because of a lack of ideas, but that's a red herring. You do have ideas, you just don’t care enough about them enough. Nothing you’re making feels important to you. You think ‘Who would want to read this?’ or ‘This will never sell.’
But Safran Foer urges writers to stop thinking about the publishing process so much. It's face-palming, obvious advice but sometimes we need to be told: focus on the actual writing. If there’s something you care about, write it. "The worst that can happen is it's a book that will be for nobody but you, but that is actually a much better fate than writing a book that lots of people like that isn't for you." Writers have written about such nuanced, strange, unassuming things that millions of people have found a way into and loved intensely. Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief? Who cares about flowers, right? Well, she made orchids seem like the most fascinating thing on the planet. Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris by Christopher Kemp is about nothing more than whale excrement. And it's brilliant. Enthusiasm is contagious - we all know and have felt that.
Safran Foer’s advice is that if something feels important or just fun, even if it’s a deviation from your plans, follow it. If a background character elbows their way to the foreground, let it. You have a new protagonist now. Be agile in your practice. Even if you’re 60 percent into a project, if the voice of a new idea or pathway can’t be silenced, then you should probably follow it. When you work on something you don’t care enough about, stuck on a set course to finish it, it can make you incredibly unhappy, he says.
Find what makes you singular as a writer. Find what is unique about you that no other writer could offer - a story, a character, a voice, a style, a form. According to Safran Foer, the way to become a successful writer isn’t to agonize over one idea for the perfect book, but to write constantly, even if no one will ever see it. Cultivate stamina. Hang onto the comet tail of good ideas, even if it means abandoning a previous idea. And always be ready to latch onto the next comet. Be the writer who doesn’t stop.
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JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER:
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestselling novels Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Here I Am, and a book of non-fiction, Eating Animals. Foer was one of Rolling Stone's "People of the Year" and Esquire's "Best and Brightest." Foer was also included in The New Yorker magazine's "20 Under 40" list of writers.
Foer attended Princeton University in New Jersey, where he studied Philosophy. It was while at Princeton that Foer was able to take an introductory writing course under the tutelage of novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Oates noted Foer's talent at an early stage, informing him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy." Of Oates, Foer later said:
"She was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."
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TRANSCRIPT:
Jonathan Safran Foer: I think very often when people refer to being stuck, or this is certainly my own experience and I've talked about it enough with friends, some of whom are writers, some of whom are other kinds of artists, some of them do other things with your life, often times when people refer to being stuck they don't mean like creatively blocked, they don't mean that they don't have any good ideas, they mean that they don't have any ideas that they care about; that nothing they're making feels important to them. When you don't care about something you just don't do a good job with it. Maybe you can for a while. It's possible to fake it for a bit or it's possible to have incentives to do things like I have a deadline or...
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/jonathan-...
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My passion is writing comments, under RUclips videos. The work is never done.
Keep up the good work, brother!
Shan don't keep it up if you are one of those shit holes who only curse
If you're into anything artistic yourself, what he is saying is very meaningful. Often times you want to get something done, for the sake of getting it done, and lose the passion and drive behind it. It's probably true for any art, not just book-writing.
So what's the simple solution in your words?
There's no simple solution, Jesus!
it's a paradox isn't it? in order to make something great, one has to let go of all expectations and attachments of needing to make something great.
somehow this comment is a lot motivating
I followed this advice (a long time ago), and wound up writing porn. The funny thing is, that it turned into a twenty year career. One could do worse.
That was absolutely the perfect piece of advice for what I needed. Thank you, Jonathan!
This is definitely me. I'm always writing notes for books, plays and movies, but I never get around to writing the whole thing.
It’s not going to work out pal
As a writer who recently published a fiction ebook, I needed this advice. Coincidentally this was one of the BigThink videos that I happened across.
One of the better videos on the channel, love the video, thank you for existing :)
He's so amazing, Everything Is Illuminated is one of the best books I've ever read.
One of the greatest Big Think videos in a while with probably the worst comments section in an even longer while. Big Think can never truly win.
This is absolutely perfect. Thank you so much.
Really helpful, I enjoyed this.
A deep and inspiring meditation on the writing process. Thank you.
The second he said the word "stuck" my computer froze, and I had to restart it. :p
Thomas Smith lol
Thank you x
The writer who doesn't stop. Love this video
I always get stuck at the ending. I heard someone say once to start at the end and backtrack
he forgets that people have to eat
THANK YOU
Then get another job while you write. Do you really think that most published authors of fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) actually live off their writing?
I have to wonder about the people who down-thumb awesome talks like this. Do they misunderstand how the thumb buttons work? I loved everything this guy said. I hope you get more videos with him!
No they just don't like it because they have a different opinion and that.
interesting, truly
these days, something rare in this channel
A nice video overall, but he dodges his own question from the beginning - if you find all of your own ideas meaningless, you can force yourself to pursue them, but they're not going to have any juice.
Tell that to George R.R. Martin...
BubuSnow93 yeah lol
I don't pretend to know what makes a "good" book. But James Michener has written many novels all of which I have enjoyed. Is he not successful? Or Patterson? Shakespeare wrote more than three and many consider him pretty good. I guess it differs depending on your audience. But some of the churn em out guys have made boatloads of money in addition to providing enjoyable entertainment for millions. I'd call that success. I suppose academics use a different threshold to gauge success.
I play pokemon go everYday
wow man. this is the first first comment I've seen in years and it's this shitty. thank you man.
ty, its nice to see someone trying to keep up with me
Hard pressed to think of more than a couple of people with 3 great books? Really? Dickens. Vonnegut. Austen. Morrison. Tartt. King. Russo. Irving. Updike. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. Twain. Hemingway. Steinbeck...
I'm pretty sure that all of those are debatable depending upon who you ask. For all his influence, Dickens has a lot of detractors, to say nothing of Hemingway, and that's just the beginning of it. And mind you, I quite enjoy several of the authors on your list. But it's all a bit subjective.
who in their right mind would ever want to be a writer .
Yeah or maybe instead of being an A.D.D. millennial chasing after every new and shiny intellectual object, learn the discipline that there will be parts of every story that are the least fun and most difficult yet still completely integral and necessary for structural reasons. I could be trolling or might be real.
I get what you're saying more clearly than what Jonathan was saying in the video.
How condescending. My writing has definitely improved by your offensive generalization. I could be trolling or I might be real...
yea since people choose to have a.d.d. and also choose to be a millennial. right?
excuse me: salinger = 4 great books
thank you goodbye (very good video otherwise ;) )
Who?
Writers don't need encouragement. And some writers should stay stuck.
would you call a lazy writer a writer? i would; the potential is there.
this was less about encouragement and more about a shift of the mind. rarely do I actually realize when I am putting up the roadblocks myself, as if it was what I am supposed to do.
Fuck off. If everyone believed that Carrie would have never been published.
Which writers should stay stuck? I've read a lot of good books that sold very few copies and come across a lot of shitty books (like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight) that sold more copies than they deserved to sell.
Why do the shitty books sell? Why do some good book go almost unnoticed? Dumb luck, I'm guessing.
Moby Dick wasn't famous until after Herman Melville was dead and it's 10 times better than that Fifty Shades of Grey female literary porn piece of crap.
Chris Nilsson sublime
Should a writer be "up-talking"....? that's usually how I weed out the flakes nobody should be listening too. This dork should take is college career back to gender studies and stop inflicting himself on the rest of the world.