All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Interpretation
Good writing often requires effort and depth, akin to the challenge of swimming underwater.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this metaphor to convey that great writing involves deep immersion in thoughts and emotions, often requiring the writer to hold back simpler, surface-level expressions. Just as swimming underwater is a strenuous task that demands focus and stamina, so too does writing well require dedication, skill, and the ability to explore complex themes beneath the surface.
In practice
In a writing workshop, teachers may use this quote to inspire students to dig deeper in their narratives.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.
Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.
We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.
Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.
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