In a 1904 let­ter, Franz Kaf­ka famous­ly wrote, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” a line immor­tal­ized in pop cul­ture by David Bowie’s “Ash­es to Ash­es.” Where Bowie referred to the frozen emo­tions of addic­tion, the arc­tic waste inside Kaf­ka may have had much more to do with the agony of writ­ing itself. In the year that he com­posed his best-known work, The Meta­mor­pho­sis, Kaf­ka kept a tor­tured jour­nal in which he con­fessed to feel­ing “vir­tu­al­ly use­less” and suf­fer­ing “unend­ing tor­ments.” Not only did he need to break the ice, but “you have to dive down,” he wrote on Jan­u­ary 30th, “and sink more rapid­ly than that which sinks in advance of you.”

Whether as writ­ers we find the evi­dence of Kafka’s crip­pling self-doubt to be a com­fort I can­not say. For many peo­ple, no mat­ter how suc­cess­ful, or pro­lif­ic, some degree of pain inevitably attends every act of writ­ing. And many, like Kaf­ka, have left per­son­al accounts of their most pro­duc­tive peri­ods. John Stein­beck strug­gled might­i­ly dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of his mas­ter­piece, The Grapes of Wrath. His jour­nal entries from the peri­od tell the sto­ry of a frayed and anx­ious man over­whelmed by the seem­ing enor­mi­ty of his task. But his exam­ple is instruc­tive as well: despite his frag­ile men­tal state and lack of con­fi­dence, he con­tin­ued to write, telling him­self on June 11th, 1938, “this must be a good book. It sim­ply must.” (See some of Stein­beck­’s hand­writ­ten entries in the image above, cour­tesy of Austin Kleon.)

In set­ting the bar so high—“For the first time I am work­ing on a real book,” he wrote—Steinbeck often felt crushed at the end of a day. “My whole ner­vous sys­tem in bat­tered,” he wrote on June 5th. “I hope I’m not head­ed for a ner­vous break­down.” He finds him­self a few days lat­er “assailed with my own igno­rance and inabil­i­ty.” He con­tin­ues in this vein. “Where has my dis­ci­pline gone?” he asks in August, “Have I lost con­trol?” By Sep­tem­ber he’s seek­ing per­spec­tive: “If only I wouldn’t take this book so seri­ous­ly. It is just a book after all, and a book is very dead in a very short time. And I’ll be dead in a very short time too. So to hell with it.” The weight of expec­ta­tion comes and goes, but he keeps writ­ing.

The “pri­vate fruit” of Steinbeck’s diary entries, writes Maria Popo­va, “is in many ways at least as impor­tant and moral­ly instruc­tive” as the nov­el itself. At least that may be so for writ­ers who are also beset by dev­as­tat­ing neu­roses. For Stein­beck, the diary (pub­lished here) was “a tool of dis­ci­pline” and “hedge against self-doubt.” This may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but keep­ing a diary, even when the nov­el stalls, is itself a dis­ci­pline, and an acknowl­edge­ment of the impor­tance of being hon­est with one­self, allow­ing tur­bu­lence and dol­drums to be a con­scious part of the expe­ri­ence.

Stein­beck “feels his feel­ings of doubt ful­ly, lets them run through him,” writes Popo­va, “and yet main­tains a high­er aware­ness that they are just that: feel­ings, not Truth.” His con­fronta­tions with neg­a­tive capa­bil­i­ty can sound like “Bud­dhist scrip­ture,” antic­i­pat­ing Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writ­ing. We needn’t attribute any reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance to Steinbeck’s jour­nals, but they do begin to sound like con­fes­sions of the kind many mys­tics have record­ed over the cen­turies, includ­ing the imposter syn­drome many a saint and bod­hisatt­va has admit­ted to feel­ing. “I’m not a writer,” he laments in one entry. “I’ve been fool­ing myself and oth­er peo­ple.” Nonethe­less, no mat­ter how excru­ci­at­ing, lone­ly, and con­fus­ing the effort, he resolved to devel­op a “qual­i­ty of fierce­ness until the habit pat­tern of a cer­tain num­ber of words is estab­lished.” A rit­u­al act, of a sort, which “must be a much stronger force than either willpow­er or inspi­ra­tion.”

In the audio above, hear actor Paul Hecht read excerpts from Stein­beck­’s diaries in an episode of the Mor­gan Library’s Diary Pod­cast. You can read Stein­beck­’s diaries in the pub­lished vol­ume, Work­ing Days: The Jour­nal of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941.

via Austin Kleon 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka Ago­nized, Too, Over Writer’s Block: “Tried to Write, Vir­tu­al­ly Use­less;” “Com­plete Stand­still. Unend­ing Tor­ments” (1915)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

See John Stein­beck Deliv­er His Apoc­a­lyp­tic Nobel Prize Speech (1962)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The word quixot­ic derives, of course, from Miguel Cer­vantes’ irrev­er­ent ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry satire, Don Quixote. From the novel’s epony­mous char­ac­ter it car­ries con­no­ta­tions of anti­quat­ed, extrav­a­gant chival­ry. But in mod­ern usage, quixot­ic usu­al­ly means “fool­ish­ly imprac­ti­cal, marked by rash lofty roman­tic ideas.” Such des­ig­na­tions apply in the case of Jorge Luis Borges’ sto­ry, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which the tit­u­lar aca­d­e­m­ic writes his own Quixote by recre­at­ing Cer­vantes’ nov­el word-for-word.

Why does this fic­tion­al minor crit­ic do such a thing? Borges’ expla­na­tions are as cir­cuitous­ly mys­te­ri­ous as you might expect. But we can get a much more straight­for­ward answer from a mod­ern-day Quixote—an indi­vid­ual who has under­tak­en many a “fool­ish­ly imprac­ti­cal” quest: Hunter S. Thomp­son. Though he would nev­er be mis­tak­en for a knight-errant, Thomp­son did tilt at more than a few wind­mills, includ­ing Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, from which he typed whole pages, word-for-word “just to get the feel­ing,” writes Louis Menand at The New York­er, “of what it was like to write that way.”

“You know Hunter typed The Great Gats­by,” an awestruck John­ny Depp told The Guardian in 2011, after he’d played Thomp­son him­self in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and a fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of him in an adap­ta­tion of Thompson’s lost nov­el The Rum Diaries. “He’d look at each page Fitzger­ald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he want­ed to know what it felt like to write a mas­ter­piece.” This exer­cise pre­pared him to write one, or his cracked ver­sion of one, 1972’s gonzo account of a more-than-quixot­ic road trip, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Menand points out that Thomp­son first called the book The Death of the Amer­i­can Dream, like­ly inspired by Fitzgerald’s first Gats­by title, The Death of the Red White and Blue.

Thomp­son referred to Gats­by fre­quent­ly in books and let­ters. Just as often, he ref­er­enced anoth­er lit­er­ary hero—and pugna­cious Fitzger­ald com­peti­tor—Ernest Hem­ing­way. He first began typ­ing out Gats­by while employed at Time mag­a­zine as a copy boy in 1958, one of many mag­a­zine and news­pa­per jobs in a “pat­tern of dis­rup­tive employ­ment,” writes biog­ra­ph­er Kevin T. McE­neaney. “Thomp­son appro­pri­at­ed arm­loads of office sup­plies” for the task, and also typed out Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and “some of Faulkner’s stories—an unusu­al method for learn­ing prose rhythm.” He was fired the fol­low­ing year, not for mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion, but for “his unpar­don­able, insult­ing wit at a Christ­mas par­ty.”

In a 1958 let­ter to his home­town girl­friend Ann Frick, Thomp­son named the Fitzger­ald and Hem­ing­way nov­els as two espe­cial­ly influ­en­tial books, along with Brave New World, William Whyte’s The Orga­ni­za­tion Man, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Every­thing (or “Girls before Girls”), a nov­el that “hard­ly belongs in the above­men­tioned com­pa­ny,” he wrote, and which he did not, pre­sum­ably, copy out on his type­writer at work. Sure­ly, how­ev­er, many a Thomp­son close read­er has dis­cerned the traces of Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er, and Hem­ing­way in his work, par­tic­u­lar­ly the lat­ter, whose macho escapades and epic drink­ing bouts sure­ly inspired more than just Thompson’s writ­ing.

In Borges’ “Pierre Menard,” the title char­ac­ter first sets out to “be Miguel de Cervantes”—to “Learn Span­ish, return to Catholi­cism, fight against the Moor or Turk, for­get the his­to­ry of Europe from 1602 to 1918….” He finds the under­tak­ing not only “impos­si­ble from the out­set,” but also “the least inter­est­ing” way to go about writ­ing his own Quixote. Thomp­son may have dis­cov­ered the same as he worked his way through his influ­ences. He could not become his heroes. He would have to take what he’d learned from inhab­it­ing their prose, and use it as fuel for his lit­er­ary firebombs–or, seen dif­fer­ent­ly, for his ide­al­is­tic, imprac­ti­cal, yet strange­ly noble (in their way) knight’s quests.

Not since Thomp­son’s Nixon­ian hey­day has there been such need for a fero­cious out­law voice like his. He may have become a stock char­ac­ter by the end of his life, car­i­ca­tured as Uncle Duke in Doones­bury, giv­en pop cul­ture saint­hood by Dep­p’s unhinged por­tray­al. But “at its best,” writes Menand, “Thomp­son’s anger, in writ­ing, was a beau­ti­ful thing, fear­less and fun­ny and, after all, not wrong about the shab­bi­ness and hypocrisy of Amer­i­can offi­cial­dom.” Per­haps even now, some hun­gry young intern is typ­ing out Fear and Loathing word-for-word, prepar­ing to absorb it into his or her own 21st cen­tu­ry reper­toire of barbed-wire truth-telling about “the death of the Amer­i­can dream.” The method, it seems, may work with any great writer, be it Cer­vantes, Fitzger­ald, or Hunter S. Thomp­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

Read 18 Lost Sto­ries From Hunter S. Thompson’s For­got­ten Stint As a For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness