{"id":4450,"date":"2013-06-05T15:50:14","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T22:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=4450"},"modified":"2013-06-05T15:50:14","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T22:50:14","slug":"henry-miller-made-me-do-it-by-james-frey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/05\/henry-miller-made-me-do-it-by-james-frey\/","title":{"rendered":"HENRY MILLER MADE ME DO IT by James Frey"},"content":{"rendered":"

from big think<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

On Writing: Henry Miller Made Me Do It<\/h1>\n

by\u00a0JAMES FREY<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Henry_miller_1940\"<\/p>\n

I became a writer after I read\u00a0Tropic of Cancer,<\/em>\u00a0by Henry Miller when I was 22. I couldn\u2019t believe somebody wrote that book. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t believe somebody said what he said and lived how he lived and wrote this book. \u00a0I was just blown away by it.<\/p>\n

And after I had finished it, I said to myself, \u201cI want to do what he did. \u00a0I want to make some punk kid somewhere feel what that book made me feel.\u201d \u00a0And from then, that\u2019s all I tried to do. \u00a0I moved to Paris. \u00a0I read a lot of books. \u00a0I sat along in rooms for hours and hours and hours, just trying to write. \u00a0I came to be a writer because I looked over the course of literary history, very few sort of writers who made it into the canon went to school to be taught to write. \u00a0You know, before 1970, that idea didn\u2019t really even exist. \u00a0So I wanted to do it sort of the old fashioned way. \u00a0Sit in a room; try to figure out how to get what was in my head on to paper.<\/p>\n

And then it\u2019s just a long process of building confidence. \u00a0For years, I couldn\u2019t do it. \u00a0And then I started to be able to do it. \u00a0And when I started to be able to do it, I did it more. \u00a0And you know, it took me about 10 years from the time I wanted to write a book to publish a book. \u00a0And it was hard. \u00a0It wasn\u2019t easy. \u00a0I think you have to devote a lot of time and energy and dedication to doing it, to learn how to sit in a room by yourself without ever losing faith in being able to do it at some point.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s one of the big traps young writers get into as well is they\u2019ll work for a month of two months or three months. \u00a0And they\u2019ll say, \u201cI\u2019m never, I can\u2019t do what I want to do. \u00a0I\u2019m never going to be able to do it.\u201d \u00a0So they give up. \u00a0I just never gave up.<\/p>\n

When I decided to become a writer, I wanted to do things in very specific ways. \u00a0I wanted to write in a way that nobody had ever done before, I wanted to use my own system of grammar; my own system of punctuation. \u00a0I wanted to lay words out on a page in very specific ways. \u00a0I wanted to sort of obliterate the ideas of fact or fiction and whether they mattered and sort of do things in some ways that come out of the art world, where genres don\u2019t really exist and where you can do a self-portrait and make it look however you want or you can take something and call it whatever you want. \u00a0You can appropriate something from whatever source you want.<\/p>\n

It took a long time. \u00a0Just me sitting in a room by myself working. \u00a0I always say to people, \u201cIf I can do it, anybody can do it.\u201d \u00a0I didn\u2019t have any special gift or any special talent; I just wanted to do it and was willing to sit there until I could.<\/p>\n

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.<\/em><\/p>\n

Image courtesy of Shutterstock<\/em><\/p>\n

[ click to read at \u00a0bigthink.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from big think On Writing: Henry Miller Made Me Do It by\u00a0JAMES FREY I became a writer after I read\u00a0Tropic of Cancer,\u00a0by Henry Miller when I was 22. I couldn\u2019t believe somebody wrote that book. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t believe somebody said what he said and lived how he lived and wrote this book. \u00a0I was just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversation-information","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}