Powerful words on writing from

St. Freddie of Rupert

Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say
By Frederick Buechner

“It is Red Smith who is reported to have said that it is really very easy to be a writer — all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. Typewriters are few and far between these days, and vein-openers have never grown on trees. Good writers, serious writers — by which I mean the writers we remember, the ones who have opened our eyes, maybe even our hearts, to things we might never have known without them — all put much of themselves into their books the way Charles Dickens put his horror at the Poor Law of 1834 into Oliver Twist, for instance, or Virginia Woolf her complex feelings about her parents into To the Lighthouse, or, less overtly, Flannery O’Connor her religious faith into virtually everything she ever wrote. But opening a vein, I think, points to something beyond that.

“Vein-opening writers are putting not just themselves into their books, but themselves at their nakedest and most vulnerable. They are putting their pain and their passion into their books the way Jonathan Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels and Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, the way Arthur Miller did in Death of a Salesman, and William Maxwell in They Come Like Swallows. Not all writers do it all the time — even the blood bank recognizes we have only so much blood to give — and many good writers never do it at all either because for one reason or another they don’t choose to or they don’t quite know how to; it takes a certain kind of unguardedness, for one thing, a willingness to run risks, including the risk of making a fool of yourself.”