PRIMO LEVI
31
your situation, or in a similar situation, and who like you have writ–
ten to me, I am forced to reveal at least this: that you are twenty–
seven years old, live in a small town, have finished classical
liceo
without excessive efforts, and now have with great difficulty found a
modest job which gives you a little money, a certain security, and
scant gratification.
You want to write and, more precisely, to tell stories; and in
fact you do write but want advice and orientation from me: how to
write. You do not pose for me, and do not pose for yourself the fun–
damental dilemma, that is, whether to write or not, and in so doing
put me in an awkward position from the start . In fact, from what
you tell me one must assume that you think of storytelling as a trade,
whereas in my opinion it is not.
'
In Italy, today, every trade coincides with a guarantee: he who
lives on writing has no guarantees . As a consequence, pure story–
tellers, those who gain their living from their creativity alone, are
very few : they are not more than a couple of dozen . The others write
in their spare time, devoting the rest of their time to publicity, jour–
nalism, publishing, the cinema, teaching, or other activities that
have nothing to do with writing. So in the first place I suggest, in–
deed I prescribe, that you hold on to your job.
If
you truly have the blood of a writer, you will find the time for
writing no matter what, it will grow around you : and, for all that,
your daily. work, boring though it may be, cannot help but supply
you with precious raw materials for your evening or Sunday writing,
beginning with human contacts, beginning with boredom itself.
Boredom is boring by definition, but a discourse on boredom can be
a vital and exciting exercise for the reader: you who have studied the
classics in school certainly already know this.
But you skip this fork in the road and yet expect from me prac–
tical and specific advice: the secrets of the trade, indeed, the non–
trade . They exist, I cannot deny it, but luckily they have no general
validity; I say "luckily" because, if they did, all writers would write in
the same way" thus generating such an enormous mass of boredom
as to render vain any attempt to pass it off as Leopardian, and to trip
the automatic switches of the most indulgent readers due to
overload. Therefore' I will have to confine myself to telling you my
personal secrets, at the risk of forming with my own hands the com–
petitor who, despite 'my "introduction," will chase me out of the
market.
