IMAGINE

Imagine if every author followed F.Scott Fitzgerald's advice. Really. Just stop and imagine if we all really challenged ourself to follow this advice.  I feel so passionately about this becuase in this time of difficult discovery we need to astound our readers no matter our genre so they can do nothing less than rave about our work outloud. 

First Fitzgerald to his daughter:

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

And to his friend:

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly... it was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood...In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile... [Literature]  is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

(Longer letters via Brainpicking here.)