How to become an original writer in three days

I was squinting at bottles of dish soap on a high shelf when the sudden blow knocked me sideways, an impact that landed slightly under my left shoulder. At the same instant in my lower peripheral vision a silvery-white streak flashed, which didn’t fully register until later. I staggered – one foot tangled with the other at the ankles, not a favorable pose for uprightness – but I kept my balance without sprawling to the floor.

The old woman wore a plain blue dress, cinched at the middle by a brown belt, un-stylishly wide: a trucker’s girdle. Having plowed me (an old man) out of her way, she grabbed from the shelf a jumbo bottle of Dawn and stalked back to her cart.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything. But I mulled over the incident for weeks, as I have often done while trying to delineate the plight of us elderly. Other marginalized groups such as women, Blacks, and gays seem to maintain a solidarity, a kind of fellow feeling, that seniors lack. Maybe it’s because members of other populations are able to identify with each other by way of specific experiences that the persons in each segment have undergone, whereas we the ancient find no special thread of commonality because we have had so many, very different things happen to us over such a long period of time. We’re just all old together. And – frantic social media posts to the contrary – age is not attractive to many in the U.S., even (or especially) those who have themselves piled on years. Biology, probably.

Of course it’s possible that nothing so complex worked on the soul of Biddy Montford that day when she body-checked me in order to reach her suds. Maybe she was simply done with men, with our evil. A relic such as me, maybe she figured, has walked the earth for how many full decades doing his relentless bad? Get out of my way. Let me shop.

By now, Reader – or well before now – you are likely wondering what my skirmish with the hag in Publix has to do with how to become an original writer in three days. Sorry I made you wait. It was the first thing that came into my head. Ludwig Borne would understand. So would Sigmund Freud.

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Ludwig Borne, who entered the world as Juda Low Baruch in Frankfurt am Main’s Jewish ghetto in 1786, made an author of himself after giving up the study of medicine. His essay, “How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days,” fell into the hands of Freud when Sig was but a lad. Borne translator Leland de la Durantaye says in his Harvard Review paper that Sig was 14 when someone gave him Borne’s collected works as a gift. The Jungian psychoanalyst Mary Watkins, in one of her books, says Sig was 13.

In any case, Borne’s method much later became the germ of Sig’s famous free-association approach, which replaced hypnotism in his manner of helping patients. “Take a stack of paper and write,” Borne counsels. “Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe,” and everything else, including “your superiors. At the end of the three days you will scarce be able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you. And that, my friends, is how to become an original writer in just three days!” Hell yes!

Borne’s teaching may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a reaction to the times – the Industrial Revolution had kicked in and everybody wanted things done fast fast fast. Among those not on board was Theophile Gautier, who sniffed at poets who “write a hundred lines in succession without crossing anything out or even looking up at the ceiling.” De la Durantaye notes that “few things [are] so annoying to careful writers as prodigious productivity, and Gautier was sensitive to this. He was also sensitive to the fact that few things are so little conducive to the creation of great art as haste. And, yet, this is precisely what Borne recommended for the creation of original art.” (He also pointed out that you don’t have to post on Substack every week. You can go two weeks. A whole month.) A few steps from Borne’s way is not only free association via Sig but also automatic writing, that pursuit popular among mediums and seance-goers back in the day. It’s gained new ground lately. Witness the documentary Life with Ghosts, wherein a widow deploys automatic writing to converse with her husband on the Other Side.

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I wonder about the Publix woman. Did she have a husband? Was he on the Other Side or yet to cross over – still hanging around the house and annoying her with his filthy obnoxious male ways? “I will have lived the life of a beast, and I shall die like an angel,” said someone dying in the care of Mother Teresa. Might everybody.

What of the woman today? Does she persist among our publics in such a way that I could meet her again, or has she passed into the realm where only mediums and seance-goers and those skilled with an automatic pen may contact her? As you can see, Reader, I strive to puzzle the matter out. In writing. This took me three days.