Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [52]
There Is No Secret 107
At his desk, with his beloved
Underwood typewriters behind him
coming. If I have a deadline for a column or a television script, I sit down at the typewriter and damn well decide to have an idea. There’s nothing magical about the process, no flashing lights.
Creativity is a by-product of hard work. If I never have another really new idea, it won’t matter. Enough writers are already exploring the new, the far-out, and the obscure. We don’t understand the old ideas yet. I’m satisfied trying to quantify the obvious.
We have our ideas. What we need now are more people who can do something good with them.
It’s a Writer
Who Makes a Fool of Himself
Writing is difficult. That’s why there’s so little of it that’s any good. Writing isn’t like mathematics where what you’ve put down is either right or wrong. No writer ever puts down anything on paper that he knows for certain is good or bad.
When I was in The Albany Academy, I won a writing prize and, because I was not otherwise a good student, it was the academic high point of my years there. Several years later, I came home from college and looked at the things I’d written to win the prize in high school and winced. They were so bad.
In college I was a prolific contributor to the school literary and humor magazine. When I got out of the Army, four years after college, I reread what I’d written in college and couldn’t believe I’d ever been so young or written so badly.
In the Army, I was assigned as a reporter to the newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, and spent three years covering World War II and learning from the great war correspondents like Hal Boyle, Bob Considine, Homer Bigart, Dick Tregaskis and Ernie Pyle. It seemed to me I was finally growing up as a writer.
In several boxes in my basement I have every issue of The Stars and Stripes printed during the time I was on the staff and they contain hundreds of stories I wrote. I like having them as mementos but I’d be embarrassed to have anyone else read them.
All this self-criticism of what I wrote in the past seems like a notunnecessarily modest attitude on my part but lately it has worried me. When do I get good? How come what I wrote last year, last month, last week and even yesterday, doesn’t seem quite right, either? How come every day I think that for the first time I’m beginning to get the hang of writing but when I reread it the following day I realize I still have a ways to go? When do I arrive as a writer?
It’s a Writer Who Makes a Fool of Himself 109
I have finally come to the sad realization that I will never write anything today that looks as good as it should to me tomorrow. It’s the writer’s albatross.
The syndrome is common among writers and, to some extent, it protects them. If writing wasn’t difficult and often even demeaning, more people would be doing it. The competition would be greater. In motion pictures, television, newspapers and book publishing, there are hundreds of producers, directors, publishers, editors and salesmen standing around waiting to get what the writer has put down on paper so they can change it, package it and sell it. Producers, directors and editors don’t become writers. Writers, seeing where the good life and the money are, become producers, directors and editors. It’s so much safer.
It’s the writer who makes a fool of himself and reveals how shallow he is by putting every thought he has on paper, where everyone can see it, read it and put it away to read again tomorrow. Those who merely speak their thoughts are safe. The spoken word drifts away and evaporates in the air, never to be held against the speaker.
“You know what I mean?” the speaker asks, as a substitute for thinking it out and putting it down on paper.
The writer may not think much but he has to know what little he thinks to get it down on paper at all. If