To Write Like Nobody But Yourself

Yes­ter­day, a friend of mine read an arti­cle I wrote, and said the writ­ing in the arti­cle read like the way I spoke. It sounds like a duh thing to say, but to me, it’s the high­est com­pli­ment pos­si­ble, because for me, it’s the hard­est thing to do.

It takes me a lot of effort to make my writ­ing sound as nat­ural as pos­si­ble with­out sound­ing like a PR drone, to remove as many lay­ers between myself and my reader as I can with as authen­tic a voice as I can muster. To say things not in the way I think I should say them, but in the way I do say them.

A poet is some­body who feels, and who expresses his feel­ings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of peo­ple think or believe or know they feel — but that’s think­ing or believ­ing or know­ing; not feel­ing. And poetry is feel­ing — not know­ing or believ­ing or think­ing. Almost any­body can learn to think or believe or know, but not a sin­gle human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because when­ever you think or believe you know, you’re a lot of other peo­ple: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you every­body else — means to fight the hard­est bat­tle which any human being can fight; and never stop fight­ing. As for express­ing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means work­ing just a lit­tle harder than any­body who isn’t a poet can pos­si­bly imag­ine. Why? Because noth­ing is quite as easy as using words like some­body else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and when­ever we do it, we’re not poets.

If at the end of your first ten or fif­teen years of fight­ing and work­ing and feel­ing, you find you’ve writ­ten one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young peo­ple who wish to become poets is: do some­thing easy, like learn­ing how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only will­ing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dis­mal? It isn’t.
It’s the most won­der­ful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

– e.e.cummings

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