On the value of unconscious association, or why the
best advice is no advice.
If this is indeed the year of reading more and writing better, we’ve been right on course with David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit
tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, and various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes John
Steinbeck — Pulitzer Prize winner,
Nobel laureate, love guru — with six
tips on writing, culled from his altogether excellent interview it the Fall
1975 issue ofThe
Paris Review.
1.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to
finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it
helps. Then when it
gets finished, you are always surprised.
2.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw
the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is
down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It
also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of
unconscious association with the material.
3.
Forget your generalized audience. In the
first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the
second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience
is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one
person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4.
If a scene or a section gets the better of
you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished
the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave
trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to
you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6.
If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you
write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
But perhaps most
paradoxically yet poetically, twelve years prior — in 1963, immediately after
receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative
writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception” —
Steinbeck issued a thoughtful
disclaimer to all such advice:
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no
one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one
person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the
writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has
that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You
must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that
makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”
If you feel bold enough to
discount Steinbeck’s anti-advice advice, you can do so with these 9 essential books on more and
writing. Find more such gems in
thiscollection of priceless
interviews with literary icons from half a century of The Paris Review archives.
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