Speak What We Feel (1-46)

This passage is from the introduction to Buechner's book, after he talks about how genuine writing is like "sit[ting] down and a typewriter and open[ing] a vein", in the words of Red Smith. He is saying how the best writers put themselves into their stories, instead of making things up that dont apply to them. He says how real writing has a certain risk factor to it, how you have to risk making a fool of yourself

But the four writers these pages are about each did it at least once, and that is the most important single thing they have in common. Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins are both great writers. Mark Twain is a very good but very uneven writer. G.K. Chesterton, for all his wit and intelligence, is a writer who wrote too much for most of it to be first-rate. But what brings them together here is that in at least one work apiece, it seems to me, each of them wrote in his own blood about the darkness of life as he found it and about how for better or worse he managed somehow to survive it, even to embrace it-Hopkins in the "terrible sonnets" of his final years, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, G.K. Chesterton in The Man who was Thursday, and Shakespeare in King Lear. It is at the very end of King Lear, in fact, that the Duke of Albany says,"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," and that seems to me to be precisely what Shakespeare himself did in writing this greatest of all his plays and what in their own entirely different ways the other three did after him.

I agree with Buechner's and Shakespeare's point in this passage, how more people need to write and speak more from their heart and less from what society wants them to do. This is something i have been pondering for awhile, and it makes me very excited to read the rest of this book, and learn more about these four great authors and how they applied their own life to their stories and their stories to their own lives.

Buechner, Frederick. Speak What We Feel New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001