“[…] writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football”.
In the Introduction to his short story collection Short Stories: Five Decades, Irwin Shaw asks, “Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful?”
He is talking about writing. And he provides the answer for it.
It’s easy to fall back and give up, especially for novice writers, those who are just starting out. When we are tangled in the web of uncertainty, discontent with our own caliber, we often do not see how rewarding it would be to just continue. We fail to see the bright side of it, the joy of writing.
Shaw compares writing to football.
“The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn’t deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.”
I find this analogy particularly interesting and relatable. Writing can be an immensely exhausting process, but also exhilarating. If you keep on in the game of writing, you will end up with a large body of work. Some days you’ll find yourself performing significantly well, while on other days, there may not be much to boast about.
Writing, which many of us perceive as a boring activity, geeks, nerds, and friendless beings engage in, can be full of life. Well, excuse my exaggeration. It’s wrong to assume writers do not have a social life.
Our experience of life largely involves interaction with the external world. And your writing breathes life when you infuse the liveliness you’ve experienced into your writing.
“Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and you tale is a joyful one.”
When I visit my earlier writing, one thing that particularly strikes me is that I used some words and phrases that I must have picked from the contents I exposed myself to.
As you revisit your earlier writings, you start to notice your influences.
The storyteller’s pleasure lies in enriching the mundane routine of the readers who seek magic and distant wonders, disguised moralizing through ordinary events and conversations, which Shaw calls “everyday transactions”.
He also derives great pleasure from allowing readers to see larger perspectives through everyday transactions and providing them with digestible portions of significant matters.
Storytelling allows you to be flexible, malleable. In your characters, there is a part of you. In some ways, your stories are repositories of your experiences. Your characters, in some way, can be reflections of you.
Shaw tells in a larger fiction like novel, you are a whole man; in a collection of short stories,” you can be all men or fragments of men”.
This collection of short stories contains sixty-three short stories flashing before your eyes snippets of human experience.
Isaac Rosenfeld had a lot to say about Irwin Shaw (I will not get into that in this post), but he rightly points out that:
“Whatever one needs to keep well informed — a knowledge of Freud, politics, modern painting, poetry — Shaw has it; his writing so highly polished, reflects this knowledge at every turn.”
( From “Irwin Shaw: Left-Wing Middle-Brow”)
