"I only ask myself whether you might not and could not do what I have so often done: begin with a certain audacity to write (quite without reflection whether or not what you write is new or good, etc.) without hesitating until you are finished so that you have on paper, a corpus of, let us say, fifteen or twenty chapters, out of which then the remainder could crystallize and which could then be always worked over."
36 year old Karl Barth to his good friend 34 year old pastor Eduard Thurneysen on February 16,1923.
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925 (Translated by James D. Smart), Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964, p. 132.
3 replies on “Karl Barth on the audacity to write”
Sounds like a definition of how NOT to write, and perhaps a key reason that Barth published too much writing without nearly enough editing.
Nope, this is pretty standard writing advice. Anne Lamott, “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident . . . Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it” (Bird by Bird, 21-22). And you don’t have to like Barth though J. I. Packer called Church Dogmatics the most important work of the 20th century http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/april24/5.92.html and Eugene Peterson says, “I would not want to be without even a page of his multivolumed Church Dogmatics.” http://books.google.com/books?id=oNgYqRp9iX8C&lpg=PP1&dq=take%20and%20read%20peterson&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q=%22I%20would%20not%20want%20to%20be%20without%20even%22&f=false
and Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I like old Barth. He throws the furniture around.”
But Geoffrey Wainwright in class at Duke Divinity School just called Barth verbose–which is of course true–8000 pages in the CD. But I have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed the 800 pages of it that I have read.
Thanks for this great quote! It is what a lot of writers say, just shut down the inner critic and write. It fits with my own experience. I’d add that the need for “audacity” continues through the editing process, something I’m working on now as I edit a first draft of my second book.