The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days
The amount of complaints from writers who hate writing, together with the shear volume of dreck and blague in the written universe, leads one to assume that no one really knows how to write, least of all writers (I know I don’t).
A similar conclusion was made by the essayist Ludwig Börne, a baptized Jew who zig-zagged around Europe in the early 19th century, trying and failing to escape censorship and antisemitic labor laws. In a short how-to essay (of the above title) from 1823 that is all of three pages he gives us what may be the greatest creative writing advice of all time—but that is no advice at all. Writing does not require knowledge or intelligence or learning, it needs rather unlearning. More repressive than any government censorship is the censorship of public opinion; it is this opinion that must be unlearned. Writing well “is the art of making oneself ignorant.” One becomes an original writer precisely by not knowing how to do it but doing it any ways.
Freud was given a collection of Börne’s essays when he was only 13 and it was the first book he “read deeply.” Many have speculated that from this book alone preceded his own life-long compulsion to write. Although later in life he claims to have forgotten the how-to essay on writing, when reminded by Freneczi that its technique bears more than a passing resemblance to the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis (the rule to say whatever is in your mind) he agreed and named this forgetting a “cryptomnesia which in so many cases may be suspected to lie behind apparent originality.” This is as close as Freud ever gets to admitting how the magic trick works; Freud’s own apparent originality as a writer is a cunning artifice; a prestidigitation hiding—even from himself—just how much he had stolen. This is not shade; as a writer I aspire to steal more than I do already.
Börne ends his essay with a fine recommendation of what would become in time the automatic writing of the surrealists, or as they say in psychoanalysis, free-association. “Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe” (Börne hated Goethe). “At the end of the three days you will scarce be able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you.”
Given the repressive political situation in Europe for Jews at that time Börne may as well have been advocating for free speech.
