Investor's Business Daily, June 27th, 2007
Writer Sherwood Anderson learned how to capture authentic American small-town life by training himself to listen and observe.
"My own desire is to develop my own sensitiveness to life to the highest possible point," he said in 1924.
Through hard work, a keen sense of observation and long hours at his writing desk, Anderson (1876-1941) transformed himself into one of America's most important early 20th century writers. He earned the accolades of fellow writers such as H.L. Mencken, who called him "America's most distinctive novelist," and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said in 1925 that Anderson was "one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today."
In 1956, William Faulkner called Anderson "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing."
In 24 books, including seven novels and four collections of short stories, Anderson surveyed the great promise and gaunt want of the American dream. He warned of the effect that would occur when rural values were left behind as the country rushed to embrace industrialization and materialism.
While Anderson loved telling stories as a youth, he developed the craft of writing through hard work. "I love passionately the mechanics of writing, the blank sheets before me, the smell of ink," he said in 1922 as quoted in "Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters."
His willingness to learn the discipline of his craft, to master it, shaped his talent. He taught himself to write through daily exercises "to catch, understand and record your own mood." He put imagined conversations and fictional vignettes on paper, only to later toss them. The point was to learn.
Once he'd mastered capturing his own mood, Anderson tackled the moods and thoughts of others. "I would like to scold everyone who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me," Anderson said, as quoted in "Sherwood Anderson" by Kim Townsend.
The key to the fiction writer, Anderson argued, was storytelling. Failing to develop that capacity crippled most writers, he said. "Where most writers fail -- and this is not clearly enough understood -- is because they aren't at bottom storytellers. They have theories about writing, notions about style, often real writing ability, but they do not tell the story -- straight out -- bang."
Despite having achieved national fame in 1919, the year his masterpiece "Winesburg, Ohio" was published, he wrote a friend that year that he was trying to go beyond simply parroting the literary efforts that came before. He wanted to take literature further. "I want constantly to push out into experimental fields. 'What can be done in prose that has not been done?' I keep asking myself," Anderson said.
He also was interested in helping others. He's considered a literary father to Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. He helped them get their first books published, advising both to write from personal experience.
Although Anderson was not immune to writer's block, his remedy, he wrote to a friend in 1922, was to drop his pen and do something else. This taught him patience.
"I have got so nowadays that if a story does not come fairly singing out of me -- if it stops dead -- I let it go, and go walk and look at the ships in the river," Anderson said. "It takes patience to do this but it works. Why ... I've got stories tucked away inside myself that have been there 10 years and I can't tell them yet. There are things I don't understand about them. I'm not ready. Someday perhaps I will be ready."
Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio. His father owned a saddlery and harness business. His mother taught him to observe life. From this, he developed "the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives."
Growing up in small towns, Anderson mowed lawns, worked in farm fields and repaired bikes. The money he earned excited him. The boy who had grown up poor discovered he could improve his lot in life.
"I wanted passionately to rise in the world, to make money," Anderson said in Townsend's "Sherwood Anderson." "I loved money, loved the feel of it, was hungry for it. It seemed to in some way warm me, comfort me. Money would buy warm clothes, food, safety."
Despite only nine months of high school, he read widely into his early 20s. He absorbed the works and ideas of Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jules Verne, Balzac, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. "They were like life itself," Anderson said, "only useful to me inasmuch as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon which I can construct new dreams."
Despite reaching national literary fame, Anderson held on to his job as an advertising writer and later as president of his own company, Anderson Manufacturing Co. He attributed his advertising writing with helping train him for his fiction-writing career.
For his fiction writing, the married Anderson kept a small writing room at the back of his house. Sparsely furnished, this would be his retreat to shut out disturbances.
The process of writing, he said, began "by a conscious effort to separate yourself more and more from yourself," he said. "Use your imagination for that purpose. Try having it lead you into the lives of others."
This story originally ran Aug. 13, 2001, on Leaders & Success.
