Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 800
Now we can see from this the difficulty so many young people find when they try to ‘practise’ writing. They are suddenly attempting to be someone else. Thus it often happens that when the conscious age of trying to write begins, young people use their correspondence with their friends as a form of practice. Ebenezer Smith, let us say, writes from Temagami camp a letter to a friend. Hitherto he has just written letters straight off, after this fashion: We got the canoes into the water about five o’clock just after the sun rose. The lake was dead calm and we paddled down to the portage in half an hour. I never saw the lake so calm. But suddenly Ebenezer becomes sophisticated and when he sits down to write, the result is such a passage as this:
A clear morning with just a faint sheen of mist before the sun kissed it away. I watched it vanish from the still surface of the lake and thought it seemed like some thin cerement, reverently drawn from the stillface of death — Oh, no, you didn’t, Ebenezer. You thought that afterwards: stick to the canoe and portage stuff. It’s more like Xenophon.
This collapse of Ebenezer Smith’s correspondence as a method of beginning to write leaves us still with the problem, how do you begin anyway? Where do you get the start and the practice?
We have just said that the ordinary education of the great mass of people, who go to school but don’t go to college, supplies them with at least a sort of elementary beginning in ‘composition,’ in the expression of thought in words. What they get is at least something: indeed it is much. But it is mainly negative. It says what not to do.
It tells them what errors to avoid. But you can’t avoid anything if you are writing nothing. You must write first and ‘avoid’ afterwards. A writer is in no danger of splitting an infinitive if he has no infinitive to split.
It might therefore be thought that in order to become a writer it is necessary to go on from school to college, and learn the ‘real stuff.’ Fortunately for the world at large this is not true. To go to college may be helpful, but it is certainly not necessary. Writing is a thing which, sooner or later, one must do for oneself, of one’s own initiative and energy. A college can help enormously but it can also hinder. Those who are debarred from the privilege of attending college may take courage. The college kills writers as well as makes them. It is true that a gifted professor can do a lot: he can show the way, can explain what are the things in literature that the world has found great, and why, in his opinion, they are so. Better still, he can communicate his own enthusiasm, and even exalt his pupils on the wings of his own conceit. More than that, the college gives companionship in study: it is hard to work alone: harder still to enjoy. Appreciation grows the more it is divided.
But as against all that, college training carries the danger of standardized judgments, of affected admiration of the pedantry of learning. Students read with one eye, or both, on the examinations, classify and memorize and annotate till they have exchanged the warm pulsation of life for the post-mortem of an inquest.
But the main point is that writing, whether done in and by college or without a college, has got to be done for and by oneself. If you want to write, start and write down your thoughts. If you haven’t any thoughts don’t write them down. But if you have, write them down, thoughts about anything, no matter what, in your own way, with no idea of selling them or being an author. Just put down your thoughts. If later on it turns out that your thoughts are interesting, and if you get enough practice to be able to set down what they really are in language that conveys them properly, the selling business comes of itself. There are many things in life, as we have said, that come to us as it were ‘at backrounds.’ Look for happiness and you find dust. Look for ‘authorship’ and you won’t find it: look for self-expression in words, for its own sake, and an editor’s cheque will rustle down from Heaven on your table. Of course you really hoped for it: but you won’t get it unless and until self-expression for its own sake breaks through.
What do you write about? You write about anything. Your great difficulty will be, as soon as you apprehend this method, that you can think things but can’t say them. Most people live and die in that state: their conversation is stuffed with smothered thought that can’t get over.
Take an example. Two people are walking out with the crowd from the roar and racket of a football game, just over. One says, ‘I don’t know that I quite believe in all that rooting stuff, eh?’ And the other answers reflectively, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m not so sure.’ That’s as far as they can get. What the first man means is that organized hysteria is a poor substitute for spontaneous enthusiasm: and what the other means is that after all even genuine enthusiasm unless organized, unless given the aid of regularity and system — even spontaneous enthusiasm degenerates into confusion; our life, itself artificial, compels a certain ‘organization.’ They can’t say this, but either of these two spectators would read with pleasure a well-written magazine article under such a title as Should Rooting be Rooted Out? The articles we think really good are those that express the things that we think but can’t say.
Now when people begin to write down their thoughts, some of them will find that their thoughts take the form of judgments, of opinions on things that are. Others will find that their thoughts instinctively run into fancies, that is, ideas of things that might happen, and these become stories. Stories are just new editions of what might happen to somebody based on what did happen to somebody else. Hence for many people the desire to write assumes the form of a sort of wish or instinct to write ‘stories.’ They turn with impatience from all talk of preparation, of practice, of words. All that seems artificial. The natural idea, to them, is to try to write a story and then try to sell it to a magazine: and thus by practice learn how to write and get paid for it at the same time.
That is all very well. But it is not for you or me. It is only a person of a higher determination, or of a tougher hide, than yours or mine who can pursue that path. The refusal of a first manuscript to certain sensitive natures, such as yours and mine, comes as such a crushing blow to self-confidence and self-belief that there is a danger that it may annihilate all further attempts. Charles Dickens in one of his happiest passages talks of the tears that came to his eyes when for the first time in his life he saw his accepted manuscript in print. I walked down to Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street.
But let someone else tell us of the unrecorded, the hidden tears shed over the manuscript that was not accepted, the story that came back. From one such disappointment the aspirant may recover, from a second, from a third — but not from many. Few beginners can realize how little editorial refusal of a manuscript really means. Editors are beset by all kinds of conditions and limitations as to space, as to what they have on hand already, as to the particular type of story (apart from merit) that they propose to use — or that their proprietors propose to use — as to scenes, settings, as to God knows what — things that a young aspirant towards writing would never dream of. He thinks that if his story is good, the editor must take it. He doesn’t know that the editor may have decided that they have accepted enough stories about love to last six months, that they can’t use rich widows for a year, have definitely decided never to use negro dialect, and can’t run anything more that has to do with the sea — or with the land — or with religion — till they’ve used all the sea and the land and the religion they’ve bought already. But of course no one beginning literary work has any idea of this.
Some beginners in writing, it is true, seem to have an inkling of this that gives them an indifference to rejection, or to have a hardy courage or a strength of self-belief that lets them rise superior to editorial discouragement. I have known a few such. A friend and contemporary of mine who turned out to be one of the most successful crime story writers of our day has told me that before he had a single story accepted he had written enough crime to fill all the penitentiaries. Another one of the best known and most honoured of Canadian writers says that he had enough rejection slips from editors to paper a room before he ever sold anything. But such an arduous path is not for you and me.
It is more reasonable to suppose that most beginners underestimate the difficulty of story-telling. What they write at first is not apt to be really worth a selling price. It is a pity to stake their literary future on their first efforts. Few people begin at their best, or even at their average level. The exceptions, such as Rudyard Kipling, who began at the top, with what seems effortless excellence — well, they’re exceptional.
Stories, I repeat, that are really worth while, are hard to write. Most people who aspire to be story writers think that stories depend upon incidents, upon a plot. This is not so. They depend on the telling. As to incident or plot, there are fundamentally only three of them, that so and so was born, that he fell in love and got married, that he died — with the variation that he fell in love and didn’t get married, and that he nearly died but didn’t. Stories about how a man nearly died and didn’t are called Adventure Stories, and stories about how a person got married, or didn’t, are called Love Stories. But the main thing in any story is to be able to think the character into reality, and then find the words to convey what you think. Once you can create a character, as the phrase runs (catch a character would be better), anything and everything about him is a story. Now you may feel very vividly that there’s a character to be caught, but you’ve got to catch him first. There is a waiter, let us say, in a restaurant you go to whom you feel to be a regular character. But saying that won’t make him one. You’ve got to catch and convey something about him that makes him one, and then you don’t need to tell your reader that the waiter is a character. He’ll say so first. What makes so many stories stupid and unreadable is that the writer instead of making characters, announces them. He says ‘the waiter was one of the quaintest characters whom our hero had ever looked upon.’ Was he? But we don’t see him. Or else the writer thinks to succeed by piling up an accumulation of details so that the sum total must at least come to something. But this, except to fill space against a price, is all wrong. The best descriptions are the shortest: their point is in their effective suggestion: the reader does the rest. The best lesson in this respect is to learn to admire and linger on the work of others: if it is true that Shakespeare (so he said) often found himself ‘admiring this man’s work and that man’s scope,’ there is no doubt that the process helped to make him Shakespeare.
We are still talking then of how to begin. I would like to offer as a practical suggestion the keeping of a sort of ‘commonplace book’ in which one writes all kinds of random attempts at expression. If you have just read a book, write a few words down about it. If a moving picture has deeply moved you, write down the fact and try to explain why. Cultivate an admiration of other people’s words and phrases that seem to express much, and write them down. Soon you will write your own. In a certain sense all literature begins with imitation. Divergence comes later. It is often thought that writing a diary is par excellence the most natural and effective way to begin writing. I don’t think so at all. A diary is apt to throw a person on the wrong track. It tends to be such an artificial business. What are you to put in it? All your most intimate thoughts? But most people haven’t got any, or none that they care to put on paper. The young heroines in novels spread out their diary and tell it that it is to be their dearest friend: I will put into it, my dear Diary, she says, all that I think, all that I feel, all that I don’t know. It sounds a large order. In reality it only means that this is the author’s way of writing the book, by pretending that the heroine wrote it. On the other hand, if a diary is written as a simple record of what happens, done in the writer’s own ordinary language, it is apt to be of no great value as literary practice. Example — Diary of J. Smith on vacation:
July 8. Went bass fishing: got six: July 9: didn’t go bass fishing: lake too rough: played poker: lost a dollar twenty: July 10: Bass fishing: didn’t get any.
Nor would it make it any better if J. Smith used his diary for the kind of fits of affectation described already in connection with correspondence:
July the %th. We went out to fish for bass, the lake a beautiful amethyst grey, very calm, as if stilled into expectancy. Our piscatorial efforts were rewarded by the capture of six bass, the larges of which we could easily see, without the need of scales, to represent a weight of five pounds at least, while all possessed a beauty of shimmering colour, a length of fin and a breadth of jaw characteristic of the large-mouthed black bass (ranunculus silva) at its largest.
On the whole, therefore, I think we may say good-bye to diary-making and personal correspondence as methods of beginning to write.
But let us come back for the moment and take the other alternative of the dilemma spoken of above. Suppose a would-be writer can’t begin? I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a ‘prep’ school will write ‘the History of Greece’ and fetch it home finished after school. ‘He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day,’ says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece — the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can’t. It’s too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of these unwritten books.
Moreover, quite apart from this non-start due to the appalling magnitude of the subject, there is a non-start from the mere trivial difficulty of ‘how to begin’ in the smaller sense, how to frame the opening sentence. In other words, how do you get started? The best practical advice that can be given on this subject is, don’t start: that is, don’t start anywhere in particular. Begin at the end: begin in the middle, but begin. If you like you can fool yourself by pretending that the start you make isn’t really the beginning and that you are going to write it all over again. Pretend that what you write is just a note, a fragment, a nothing. Only get started.
So let us get the book started in the next chapter.
CHAPTER TWO. THE LAWS OF GRAMMAR AND FREE SPEECH
GOOD SOCIETY AND bad grammar — Grammar has no rights which the writer is bound to respect — Usage rules — Whose usage? — Where the McGregor sits is the head of the table. But who is McGregor? — Grammar follows, not leads — Not a prescription but a post-mortem — The tyranny of authority — The French Academy — English free speech — The revolt of the pronouns: Are these they?
Or is that them? — The massacre of the suffixes — The insurrection of the split infinitive — Outlawed words: Have you only got a tendency to write like Shakespeare wrote?
AS said in the chapter above, each of us has had at school a sort of preliminary training in the correct use of language. We are taught to distinguish between what is ‘good grammar’ and what is ‘bad grammar’ — a phrase which is probably itself ‘bad grammar.’ Some celebrated person in England once said, ‘I cannot conceive that the study of grammar is of the slightest use to people who have always mixed in good society.’ I forget who said it, but it was one of those things which, once said, seem to stick and to be kept alive by repetition. One may compare it with the famous utterance which Molière puts into the mouth of one of his characters: ‘People of quality know everything without having ever learned anything.’ It also suggests a certain English magazine of the late nineties of last century that was founded ‘to be written for gentlemen by gentlemen.’
But even if the study of grammar has no meaning for people who have always moved in good society, it has plenty of meaning for those of us who always haven’t, or have moved in plenty of bad as well. We can appreciate the service performed by the ‘laws of grammar’ towards the stability of language, by turning to look at what happens to language when it heads away from the law. I refer to the unrestrained language of grammarless people, exuberant in its very errors. No better example of this can be found than in the reproductions of it which the late Ring W. Lardnerused to love to weave into the dialogue of his stories. Lardner, whose relatively early death cut short a literary career in its full course, was a great humorist, and like many great humorists he found the chief source of his humour in plain truth, not in exaggeration, but in setting forth life and character exactly as it is, with just enough of unseen selection and omission to set what he selected in a high light. A part of such a method involved the reproduction of the natural speech of plain people — humorous in its contact with correct language, and with its mock dignity on a printed page.
Here, in evidence, are a couple of sentences taken from a little story of great simplicity and charm (The Golden Honeymoon), recounting the golden wedding holiday tour of an aged couple, midway between rich and poor, but a long way from wealth of language. They meet fortuitously another old couple, acquaintances of long ago. Only Ring Lardner could put so much into so little — so much of character, interesting because it is not that of one old man but of millions — of retrospect, not of two old couples but of all old couples. He does it by letting them talk, the old man as a narrator.
Reunion of old friends:
Then they came over and hunted us up and I will confess I wouldn’t of known him. Him and me is the’ same age to the month, but he seems to show it more some way.
Description of a Public Amusement Park:
In the middle they’s a big band stand and chairs for the folks to set and listen to the concerts which they give you music for all tastes, from ‘Dixie’ up to classical pieces like ‘Hearts and Flowers’ Then all around they’s places marked off for different sports and games — chess and checkers and dominoes for folks that enjoys those kind of games.
