YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN

“No one can build you the bridge

 on which you, 

and only you,

 must cross the river of life.”

-  Nietzsche

 “The true and durable path

 into and through experience

 involves being true … 

to your own solitude,

 true to your own secret knowledge.”

- Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney 

We live in a Pavlovian culture of 
constant feedback, 

in which the easiest and commonest opinions

 are most readily rewarded, 

and dissenting voices 

are most readily punished by the unthinking mob. 

So when we write we must ask 

if we wish to be popular when read or to be true to what we feel is best in the human condition ...

to be a pioneer or to be one of the herd.

To be a writer is to feel authentically, 

for that is the only way to write prose that touches the inner person of the reader.

 Why? 

Because whenever you think or you believe or 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 an author 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 are not authors but cookie cutters.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. 

 So bleed that one true sentence, and go on from there."
- Hemingway

We are modern Argonauts -- 

The Argonauts 

(Ancient Greek: Ἀργοναῦται Argonautai) 

were a band of heroes in Greek mythology, 

who in the years before the Trojan War accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. 

Our Golden Fleece is to write the best prose of which we are capable. 

So good fortune, 
my fellow Argonauts,

the prevailing winds 
are against us.  

But as authors, we know that it is the struggle that makes the adventure.