Five Life Changing Writing Lessons from “The Great Gatsby”

I’ve taught F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to high school students for the past 20 years. Each year we read through the novel and I make note about Fitzgerald’s style and writing strategies through the responses of students and through my own observations.

I decided to compress these many observations down into a list of five things that Fitzgerald does (and does well), because as a novelist I feel that these are lessons that any writer can use to enhance their own writing style.

1. Complexity

We can pull any sentence from Fitzgerald’s piece and it is full of colorful adjectives, has surgically chosen diction, and is brimming with immediate and precise description. Case in point, here are a couple of sentences taken from the first few pages of the first chapter:

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. — (Fitzgerald, 6)

This first quote is when Nick is discussing the advice of his father, but the repeated word “snobbishly” denotes a tone of disdain for the advice and at the same time disgust that he is falling into his father’s shoes. Our sentences should be as densely crafted if we are going to write great prose. And another:

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear whereupon Tom frowned…