So you say you want to be a writer

Tell us again why that is.

Baz Luhrmann who directed and has a screenplay writing credit for the latest movie version of The Great Gatsby had some interesting things to say about author Scott Fitzgerald during an interview with Stephen Colbert tonight.  It might make the aspiring writer consider another line of work, especially now in a world where flashy movies draw the audiences great books once did.

One of the interesting facts he proposed was that Fitzgerald died at the age of 44, a time when he had been buying copies of the book, just so it would show some sales.

But that wasn't the most astounding of Luhrmann's illuminations.  Though the movie is only scheduled for general release tomorrow (May 10) enough people have seen it or heard about it that sales of the book have exploded.  In fact, Luhrmann said more copies of the book sold last week than were purchased during the entire of Fitzgerald's lifetime.  Think about that for a moment: A classic in American literature, a must for every student of that literature beginning in high school and in one week in 2013, that classic sold more copies than it did in the 15 years between 1925 when it was first published and 1940 when the author died at the age of 44.  In fact it is the Number 1 best seller listed by Amazon and has been in the top 100 in sales for 790 days.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald could only know.

And for the rest of us who toil in the shadow of classics and see, now, how one was treated, pause, look at our tortured prose, mostly unlikely to ever reach anything near the status of Gatsby at the pinnacle of the Lost Generation's massif, and we have to wonder.  Why do this?  There is no simple answer except to say, because we have to and there is nothing we can do about that.  Perhaps it is a disease or at least a psychosis.

Either way it is terminal.

Maybe the answer is simply in the quotation below from Gloria Steinem, "Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."

And if that wasn't discouraging enough, look what happened to the writer who invented the detective story.