Mining Material in One Segment of Your Experience Is A Key to Success in Writing and Art.
Scott Fitzgerald felt that successful writers have a few events in their lives that steal their mind and 
heart and they write about in one form or another time and again. What had occurred in the writer’s life before age twenty-one is the period of their life where most good writers find their richest material. Writer after writer reports that. Exceptional writers have exceptional memories. Their talent to evoke from their memories in exact detail written images of the places, people, and events they recall is remarkable. Artists too may have extraordinary memories and paint visual images of them.
When we were seventeen for adventure and to acquire material for hopefully future careers in creative writing my friend Nick and I crisscrossed the country on freight trains illegally for six months, living the life of wandering hobos before we started college. We were shot at with bullets buzzing past our heads, and chased by police with growling German shepherds snapping at our heels, four dollars to my name. Few people have that experience. It meets the writer’s critical need for originality. You can’t forget the details of an adventure like that. They provided me with material to write a unique book of poetry I titled The Poetry of Riding Freight Trains Across America. and since then other poems and blogs about freight train travel by the two of us. An editor said: “I was hooked from the first poem about that extraordinary world of lost men.”
Hobos in a Clearing
We reach the crest of the hill at dusk.
Below us, like the camps of infantry,
Burn the scattered fires of forgotten men,
Each a separate picture.
They live in the open or in
The opulence of tarpaper lean-tos against a tree,
And migrate as punctually as geese.
They wear black–perhaps it is the soot of freight trains–
And squat on their haunches like crickets
Beside the snapping flames.
Streams of smoke trail off high into the trees
And embers flicker and fade, flicker and fade
In the harsh bite and sparkle of the wind,
And glow bronze on the men’s untroubled faces
Late into the night.
Painter Julian Levi said, “It seems to me that almost every artist finds some subdivision of nature or experience more congenial to his temperament than any other. To me, it had been the sea…In painting the sea coast I have tried to acquire as much objective knowledge of the subject as I possibly could.” Levi studied the fishermen, fishing gear, their boats and assorted paraphernalia. T.S Eliot said, “We all have to choose whatever subject matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.”
Literary critic Gilbert Murray wrote, “It seems to me that the writers who have the power of revelation are just those who, in some particular part of life, have seen or felt considerably more than the average run of intelligent beings. I think that the great difference intellectually between one painter or writer or one actor or director and another is simply the number of things they can see in a square yard of their specific world of creation.”
Most–not all–artists and writers strive to have an original voice. Writers ask themselves, “What do I have to say or paint that people will find interesting enough to pay X dollars to put in their bookcase or on their wall?”I always ask myself, “Did the book buyer get their money’s worth?”
To find your best creative niche you must ask yourself: “What area of my life do I know better than other artists and writers do, am fascinated by, and wish to write about or paint frequently during my life?” Claude Monet painted his beautiful garden innumerable times. Paul Cezanne painted the rolling hill he could see from his window many times. Edgar Degas painted ballerinas.
Artists I know specialize in painting clouds and others paint skies exclusively. Many artists paint landscapes and birds and flowers. They then work with that specific material, possibly for their entire lives. It is their most creative world, their signature, what we know them by.
It is not a random choice, but a discriminating, highly selective instinct, a particular order of things that has an outstanding appeal to the person. American writers Ernest Hemingway and before him Stephen Crane were drawn to men under extreme pressure where the best way out of danger was through having courage.
Strive For Freedom As Though Only You Exist
William Faulkner became great as soon as he decided that the only person whose opinion he cared about was his own.
Unless they please themselves, artists and writers will please nobody. They function best when while at work they are thinking of nobody’s liking but their own: “I alone here, on my inch of earth, paint this thing for my own sole joy, and according to my own sole mind. So I should paint it, if no other human being existed but myself…Thus I must do it, for thus I see it, and thus I like it.” (John Ruskin.)
© 2026 David J. Rogers
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satisfaction watching and listening to him, and wanted to watch and listen all day. What was happening to me was beyond me to describe. I was young; I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it. But I am far from young now, and still do not have the vocabulary, not because my vocabulary is deficient, but because when you see or read or hear something that is so out of the ordinary that it is almost beyond belief, you are unprepared for it and no words in all the lexicons, even the most expressive, are sufficient. That is art.
One day in the third grade my favorite teacher, Miss Gross, standing in the front of the room, started reading something I had written. She had had us describe something that had happened to us, and because 
Every writer and painter has in their memory at least one moment and one thought or image that captures their imagination and provides inspiration for their work. Every writer and every painter reading this post remembers such a scene and such a pristine, unforgettable moment that occurred in their youth, middle age, or old age.
Then there was a sound of a wind thrashing the wheat fields, rippling the fields in great waves like breakers tumbling upon a beach. Looking, listening, alone, no fear, feeling joy, free, that was the loveliest moment in my life. Only I had seen the bird. There was no one near enough to see it, only I–the bird with the flaming red wings coming from out of the field against a background of no other movement but the wind-blown fields, and no one else on earth to witness its flight. I now in a car bound for California saw in the bird the beauty that from childhood a writer is always hoping to convey in their writing, the beauty a painter always hopes to paint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896-1940) writing was the major interest in his life. From grade school to his death nothing was quite true to him unless he had written about it. He was a fine writer, and his writing was always about himself or people he was intimate with. As a result his life was inextricably bound up with his work and his life with his kooky and attractive wife Zelda was an interest in itself. He lived a colorful life and a disastrous one with Zelda. They lived like fairy-story hero and heroine, filling newspapers with reports of their wild life-style. Much of the disaster of their lives were of their own making. Fitzgerald is called the creator of the Jazz Age which began with his writing best seller This Side of Paradise at the age of twenty-four, making him rich, his goal for writing it. The book became the voice of the younger hedonistic, thrill-loving, post-World War I generation.
When you grow up in Chicago as I did
When I was seventeen I 
Then in a second dream
All writers are equipped with a good memories, but Thomas Wolfe’s memory was astonishing. Because of it he was able with ease to recall events, people, and places in stunning detail. That was his strength. His weakness was an inability to restrain the deluge of words that poured out of him from evening to dawn as he wrote, or when he spoke, and he simply, despite himself, had no ability to stay within the requirements of writing a saleable novel. He had no concept of how to write such a book and needed the help of his editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, who at the same time was the editor of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two other difficult clients.
No writer in the nineteen thirties–or even now–could write with the beauty of Thomas Wolfe’s prose. His reputation after his death suffered because of the perceived formlessness and verbiage of his writing in an age when critics preferred tight structure and economy of language–short sentences and short episodes, and highly-focused scenes rather than the volume and torrents of Wolfe’s language. Once considered by Nobel Prize winners William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis to be America’s finest writer, and in the past extremely popular with readers and critics, Wolfe is now almost never read–unfortunately in my opinion, if one is interested in being inspired by the brilliance of written expression. Hard as you look, you will not find Thomas Wolfe–once thought a towering genius–in current anthologies of American literature.
My poem describes the first hobo camp of about three hundred men we came upon, a camp looking like “the camps of infantry.” We went down the hill to meet the men, slept there a few days, ate fried beans, and listened to and took notes about the stories the forgotten men enjoyed telling.
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