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Seven Tips From Fitzgerald
Seven Tips From Fitzgerald
a 1923 interview for Metropolitan magazine. I simply took girls who I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines. In the opening sentence of his 1926 short story, The Rich Boy, Fitzgerald explains the principle: Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have creatednothing. 5: Use familiar words. In a 1929 letter to his college friend and fellow writer John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald says: You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless youve had tosearch for it to express a delicate shadewhere 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. 6: Use verbs, not adjectives, to keep your sentences moving. In a 1938 letter to his daughter, Fitzgerald writes: 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 movementthe limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes. 7: Be ruthless. A writer has to make some hard choices. Fitzgerald warns about the danger of becoming too attached to something youve written. Keep an objective eye on the whole piece, he says, and if something isnt working get rid of it. In a 1933 Saturday Evening Post article titled One Hundred False Starts, he writes: I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England consciencedeveloped in Minnesotaand my greatest problem: Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back? Shall I say: I know I had something to prove, and it may develop farther along in the story? Or: 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. There are often occasions when such a decision is doubly difficult. In the last stages of a novel, for instance, where there is no question of junking the whole, but
when an entire favorite character has to be hauled out by the heels, screeching, and dragging half a dozen good scenes with him.