Monday Morning Writing Motivation

Writing is a fickle skill. When it's easy, you can't stop doing it; when it's hard, it's all you can think about. Sometimes you pick up a pen and just start scratching away. Other times, you can hold a pen in hand for hours without touching the page.

Over the last couple years, one of my inspirations for writing has been Benjamin De Casseres. I ran across him while working on a paper that I delivered at the Mythmoot II conference in Baltimore. Since then, I've become quite obsessed with him.

His epigrammatic writing style is nothing if not unique. During the forty-five years of his active writing life, he amassed accolades from a wide variety of authors: H. L. Mencken, Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, to name a few.

The thing that impresses me most about De Casseres is the sheer output. He wrote from about 1899 until his death in 1945, and during that time he never stopped writing. The words just came out of him. He wrote book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, poetry, short stories, books, pamphlets, and so much more. And his correspondence was epic! I've managed to collect literally thousands of his works through digital newspaper, magazine, and book archives, and I feel like I've only barely scratched the surface.

How did he do it? I've often asked myself. I don't know; all I know is that he did it. I have to assume he had the same struggles as any other writer, with blocks and dead ends and aborted works that have never seen the light of day. But through it all he kept going.

And so do I. Not nearly with the same level of success or output as De Casseres had – he wrote for the Big Three papers in New York City (the Times, the Herald and the Sun at a time when Hearst and Pulitzer were soundly beating the world with their yellow journalism (proto-clickbait, as I like to call it). I don't ever expect to match his output, but with a little effort, hopefully I can at least feel like I accomplished something.

What motivates you to write?