Advice from Rainer Maria Rilke

I read Rainer Maria Rilke's book Letters to a Young Poet last summer and forgot that I had taken some notes in a word document. I think there are many important points here but I think that number 2 has had the biggest impact on my own views toward writing; motivation is extremely important and when there is an exhaustible motivation the desire to write will fade. "Must I write?" is a question each writer must ask him/herself.

1. Writing must have individual quality

2. Go inside yourself

Discover the motive that bids you to write

Ask “must I write?”

“A work of art is good if it is grown out of necessity.”

“Go into yourself and explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”

3. Draw near to nature

4. Avoid familiar and usual forms

“For great and fully matured strength is needed to make an individual contribution where good and in part brilliant traditions exist in plenty.”

5. Turn from common themes to those themes of your personal life

6. Depict your sorrows, desires, passing thoughts, and belief in beauty with heartfelt sincerity through images that surround yourself.

7. Turn your attention to childhood memories.

8. Do not be governed by irony

At the depths of things irony never descends

Use it if it springs from a necessity of your being

9. “Patience is all!”

10. Live with the questions in yourself

11. Love your solitude

12. Be near things which will not desert you

13. Hold to the difficult

14. “Only those sorrows are dangerous and bad which we carry about among fellows in order to drown them.”

15. Concentrate on the object rather than personal feelings about the object.

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