"Write whatever you like!"
About this Quote
A small imperative opens a wide field. To be told simply to write whatever you like is both liberating and disconcerting, because it removes the props of assignment and authority and asks you to locate your own necessity. Seamus Heaney, a poet who moved from a farm in County Derry to the world stage, understood that poetry begins in permission: permission to notice, to remember, to sound out the world in your own cadence. The phrase carries his characteristic generosity as a teacher at Queen's, Harvard, and Oxford, where he encouraged students to find their subject rather than imitate a canon.
That freedom is not a shrug toward carelessness. Heaney prized craft, and his poems show how choice becomes responsibility: every word weighed, every rhythm earned. Write whatever you like implies do not write what you think is required by politics, fashion, or curriculum; instead commit to what presses most truthfully on your senses and conscience, then shape it with patience. It amounts to an ethic of sincerity and attention.
Coming from a writer marked by the Troubles, the injunction also resists the corrosive pressure to self-censor. Heaney once wrote Whatever you say, say nothing about the climate of fear that policed speech. Setting beside it the invitation to write whatever you like suggests a counter-movement from silence to utterance, from constraint to risk. It trusts that language, when credited and carefully handled, can redress imbalance and enlarge the realm of the sayable.
Heaney's Nobel lecture urged us to walk on air against our better judgement, a leap of faith that art requires. Write whatever you like names the first step of that walk. It blesses idiosyncrasy, local detail, the music of the ordinary, and it asks the writer to own both freedom and form: to choose, and then to make the choice sing.
That freedom is not a shrug toward carelessness. Heaney prized craft, and his poems show how choice becomes responsibility: every word weighed, every rhythm earned. Write whatever you like implies do not write what you think is required by politics, fashion, or curriculum; instead commit to what presses most truthfully on your senses and conscience, then shape it with patience. It amounts to an ethic of sincerity and attention.
Coming from a writer marked by the Troubles, the injunction also resists the corrosive pressure to self-censor. Heaney once wrote Whatever you say, say nothing about the climate of fear that policed speech. Setting beside it the invitation to write whatever you like suggests a counter-movement from silence to utterance, from constraint to risk. It trusts that language, when credited and carefully handled, can redress imbalance and enlarge the realm of the sayable.
Heaney's Nobel lecture urged us to walk on air against our better judgement, a leap of faith that art requires. Write whatever you like names the first step of that walk. It blesses idiosyncrasy, local detail, the music of the ordinary, and it asks the writer to own both freedom and form: to choose, and then to make the choice sing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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