F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips, is a slim volume of 96 pages that collects Fitzgerald’s advice and thoughts on the craft that he practiced. Originally published in 1985, it was recently reprinted in November 2024. It was a book that had escaped my attention until I saw it in a bookstore this spring. I was quite surprised that there was a compilation of Fitzgerald’s writing that I was unaware of.
The later volume F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, from 1996, covers similar ground as F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, as you might expect from the titles. While FSF on Authorship is a more scholarly tome, including the full text of Fitzgerald’s various articles and essays on writing, FSF on Writing features brief excerpts from Fitzgerald’s writing and is meant for a more general audience. FSF on Authorship is also twice as long as FSF on Writing. Phillips selected some relevant quotes from Fitzgerald’s novels about writing. One of my favorites is from his novel The Beautiful and Damned: “Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than anyone else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.” (p.9) This seems to me an apt quotation that applied to Fitzgerald himself as well.
There are many fantastic quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. One of my favorites is this one: “It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can’t be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring.” (p.37)
Fitzgerald’s admiration for the Polish/British novelist Joseph Conrad comes through strongly in this volume. Fitzgerald wrote: “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.” (p.41) I suspect that Conrad’s novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim strongly influenced Fitzgerald as he wrote The Great Gatsby, particularly in his decision to make Nick Carraway a partially involved narrator, after the fashion of Conrad’s narrator Marlow.
A quote that I found fascinating comes from a letter that Fitzgerald wrote to Andrew Turnbull in 1933. Turnbull, a future biographer of Fitzgerald, was 12 years old in 1933, and Fitzgerald was renting a house on the Turnbull family property. Fitzgerald wrote: “Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use...most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence.” (p.82-3)
I find that a fascinating idea, that men conceal their intelligence until it has to be used. Fitzgerald was fond of showing off his intelligence at a young age, and he understood how that intelligence isolated him. This fits perfectly with one of my favorite quotes about Fitzgerald’s personality. One of his colleagues from the army said of Fitzgerald, “He was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.23) This captures Fitzgerald so well—he wanted to be liked, but he was far too intelligent to be a conformist. At some point during his life, Fitzgerald understood it was better to draw less attention to his intelligence.
There are so many terrific nuggets in F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. Some of my favorites are: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” (p.3) “Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.” (p.13) “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.” (p.52) F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly a writer who had something important to say.
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