My brother loved this text and offered it to me in the form of a book.
Reading it, I was disapointed. It paints the support from Rike, an experienced and depressed poet, to a young and depressed one.
While I can perceive the moral aid it can bring, I didn't benefit from it. It's full of never desmontrated general advices with no given first step to be applied, and often, not even practical applications.
He is a poet after all, and those lines are not meant to be a self help book.
So sure, they are well written, the author can relate to the human condition, and the particular suffering of the receiver. But no matter how you present it, hearing "follow your passion", "don't listen to critics" and "that's life" once more is not adding anything to my current state of understanding of the world.
One could argue that it's more of an aesthetic exercice, and if you look at it that way, it's a success. The prose is touching and clear.
You could also say that the content will speak more to people struggling with the process of art, or just being true to yourself. However, the author offers descriptions, weak analysis, and no solutions. He admits himself that he is still stuck at the same level.
If one craves empathy, or to ear that somebody shared the same hardship, I imagine it can be therapeuthic.
But I learned little from those letters, didn't enjoy it, and didn't benefit their from support.
Maybe you will. It's a short book, so it's not a big time sink.
If you read the first paragraphs and don't feel like carring on, you don't need to go further. It doesn't transform into something different on the way.
Specific actionable bit: "... as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary ... write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. ... use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember."
tl;dr "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron"
Edit: one exercise from soviet education (no idea if this is still done in modern russia) I'd think worth stealing is that the teacher would pick a selection of famous lines out of a poem, and ask the class to write their own verses around one of them.
If I remember the story correctly, the chorus to Leningrad's "In [St.] Peter[sburg] we booze" was inspired by a line "Peter — endure, endure" from a classical russian poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc
I found that it works great in programming too: take a very beautifully crafted code, remove some bits, and ask the students to fill in the blanks, or wrap something around it.
The students then gain many things out of it:
- they practice reading someone else code
- they have to understand a problem to solve from context
- they get to craft a solution to that problem
- they don't have to start "from scratch", which is easy to do for simple problems, but hard as soon has you dwelve into advanced concepts
Above all, like the soviet education exercice, one untold benefit is that they get to see the beautiful code itself. It's not only inspiring and driving their efforts, it builds taste.
Simple advices to not take criticism too close to your heart is probably a pretty universial recommendation. Not only for writers, for developers too. Everyone can fail at that and I think reiterating this advice is help itself.
Comments
My brother loved this text and offered it to me in the form of a book.
Reading it, I was disapointed. It paints the support from Rike, an experienced and depressed poet, to a young and depressed one.
While I can perceive the moral aid it can bring, I didn't benefit from it. It's full of never desmontrated general advices with no given first step to be applied, and often, not even practical applications.
He is a poet after all, and those lines are not meant to be a self help book.
So sure, they are well written, the author can relate to the human condition, and the particular suffering of the receiver. But no matter how you present it, hearing "follow your passion", "don't listen to critics" and "that's life" once more is not adding anything to my current state of understanding of the world.
One could argue that it's more of an aesthetic exercice, and if you look at it that way, it's a success. The prose is touching and clear.
You could also say that the content will speak more to people struggling with the process of art, or just being true to yourself. However, the author offers descriptions, weak analysis, and no solutions. He admits himself that he is still stuck at the same level.
If one craves empathy, or to ear that somebody shared the same hardship, I imagine it can be therapeuthic.
But I learned little from those letters, didn't enjoy it, and didn't benefit their from support.
Maybe you will. It's a short book, so it's not a big time sink.
If you read the first paragraphs and don't feel like carring on, you don't need to go further. It doesn't transform into something different on the way.
Specific actionable bit: "... as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary ... write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. ... use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember."
tl;dr "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron"
Edit: one exercise from soviet education (no idea if this is still done in modern russia) I'd think worth stealing is that the teacher would pick a selection of famous lines out of a poem, and ask the class to write their own verses around one of them.
If I remember the story correctly, the chorus to Leningrad's "In [St.] Peter[sburg] we booze" was inspired by a line "Peter — endure, endure" from a classical russian poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc
This is a great exercice.
I found that it works great in programming too: take a very beautifully crafted code, remove some bits, and ask the students to fill in the blanks, or wrap something around it.
The students then gain many things out of it:
- they practice reading someone else code
- they have to understand a problem to solve from context
- they get to craft a solution to that problem
- they don't have to start "from scratch", which is easy to do for simple problems, but hard as soon has you dwelve into advanced concepts
Above all, like the soviet education exercice, one untold benefit is that they get to see the beautiful code itself. It's not only inspiring and driving their efforts, it builds taste.
Simple advices to not take criticism too close to your heart is probably a pretty universial recommendation. Not only for writers, for developers too. Everyone can fail at that and I think reiterating this advice is help itself.