When considering what to write, and how to write it, I’m always reminded of some advice I received from one of my favourite professors, Edward Neill¹, while I was studying for my undergraduate degree in what seems like a very different life now.

He said: “write the last line first”.

This instantly resonated with me, because that’s how I’d always read when I was younger. Whenever I was given a new book to read by my parents, or took a stack of books out on a visit to the library, the first thing I would do would be to sneak a guilty look at the very last page, and the very last line. Of course, sometimes this gave an entirely wrong impression - I remember first reading The Great Gatsby when I was 12, duly looking at the last line, and thinking it was some sort of tale of adventure on the high seas.

Recently, for my birthday, I was given a lovely anthology of Rainer Maria Rilke by a very close friend. As well as being a handy pocket-friendly reference for all of Rilke’s beautifully intimate forms of poetry (if you miss someone, be sure to avoid reading “Parting” in particular), it also contains “Letters To A Young Poet” which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a collection of ten letters between an aspiring poet/writer about to enter the army and Rilke.

The letters almost read as a manual for what it means to be both an artist and a person. There’s one piece of advice in particular from Rilke which has stuck with me as much as the words of my professor, from his very first reply back to the young poet:

“You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and you are troubled when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (as you have permitted me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must‘, then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, as if you were one of the first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.”

…which is frankly a beautiful sentiment. And it becomes even more striking when you realise that Rilke was only 27 when he wrote the first letter - the correspondence between himself and the aspiring poet would last for the next 5 years.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that when thinking about any form of writing, I remember the advice from both my professor and Rilke. And I wonder what the last line will be?