The Written Word
Follow the brush
Never change the technology
v0.crap
One brick
More that can be done
To deprecate beauty itself
iA writer
Scientific writing
What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.
Information remix
Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.
Angkorwatification
Applied to a blog, angkorwatification is a sort of textual equivalent of rewilding. You have a base layer of traditional blog posts that is essentially complete in the sense of having created, over time, an idea space with a clear identity, and a more or less deliberately conceived architecture to it. And you have a secondary organic growth layer that is patiently but relentlessly rewilding the first, inorganic one. That second layer also emerges from the mind of the blogger of course, but does so via surrender to brain entropy rather than via writerly intentions disciplining the flow of words.
Narrative codes
The idea, as both sides' counsel worked it out, is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'Once upon a time...' or 'Far, far away, there once dwelt...' or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly. For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what kind of book it is, i.e., whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important, because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction.
Stories
I know nothing of stories.
Poppies
I write, erase, rewrite,
erase again, and then
a poppy blooms.Imagining her
I think this is perhaps the hardest part of writing—of “generously imagining her”—continuously, unendingly. And this is the only difference between good and bad writing in the end. That doesn’t mean it’s easy (being kind is often the hardest thing to do) and of course I mention this not to lecture anyone but only as a keepsake and as a reminder for myself.
Like normal people
Abe: What's wrong with our hands?
Aaron: What do you mean?
Abe: Why can't we write like normal people?
Aaron: I don't know...I can see the letters. I know what they should look like, I just can't get my hand to make them.
Thinking in terms of outputs
In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.
Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.
The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.
Babble and Prune
For those who read and listen much more than they speak (guilty), an overly-strict Prune filter is applied to their writing; when these people go to write something of their own, their minds don’t produce thoughts nearly as “coherent, witty or wise as their hyper-developed Prune filter is used to processing”.
Hence, my dilemma and an opportunity to break out of this trap. I recognised that if I attempted to write at the quality I was used to reading at, first time every time, my brain would promptly grind to a halt—like trying to brainstorm with a group that laughs at your suggestions.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
A Book by Verlyn KlinkenborgHere, in short, is what I want to tell you.
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn't say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.The Elements of Style
A Book by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White- Choose a suitable design and hold to it
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition
- Use the active voice
- Put statements in positive form
- Specific, definite, concrete
You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
An Essay by James SomersThe Sense of Style
A Book by Steven PinkerDownsides of the internet
An EssayThe type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following:
- The writer stops publishing their work.
- The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business.
- The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour.
The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly.
only the questions
A Tool by Clive ThompsonI’ve been watching how writers use questions lately, and thought: Hmmm, it’d be cool to see only the questions in a piece of prose.
gwern.net
A Website by Gwern BranwenThe goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.
Some thoughts on writing
An Essay by Dan LuuBesides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important.
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting
An Article by Matt Webb- The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
- Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
- Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
Stream on
An Article by Simon CollisonA primary motivation for creating my Stream was the paralysing sense that a blog post needed appropriate length and weight. Since switching to Kirby, there’s relatively little friction to posting, but there’s definite friction in evaluating a post’s worth to the reader. I’d think to myself, “I’d like to write something about that, but I’ll have to come up with all sorts of extra stuff and dressing, and it’ll take all afternoon.”
And so, I was increasingly aware that I was letting many interesting or essential thoughts go undocumented, allowing them to drift from memory, or exist only on social media, likely to one day evaporate. I’ve become more and more interested in the human desire to document, and it’s something I’ve always valued, so I needed to find a solution that I could entirely control and own. That solution was my Stream.
Things Learned Blogging
An Article by Jim NielsenEschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics...Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.
...[And] write for you, not for others. And if you can’t think of what to “write”, document something for yourself and call it writing.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the mystery of blogging, it’s that the stuff you think nobody will read ends up with way more reach than anything you write thinking it will be popular.
So write about what you want, not what you think others want, and the words will spill out.
Writing, Briefly
An Article by Paul GrahamAs for how to write well, here's the short version:
Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;
rewrite it over and over;
if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;
expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it;
start writing when you think of the first sentence;
write about stuff you like;
learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.Writing and Speaking
An Essay by Paul GrahamBeing a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.
Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand
An Article by Herbert LuiIn the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:
“Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”
Blogging with Version Control
An Article by Will DarwinI’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.
...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.
Don't Write the Tedious Thing
An Article by Maud NewtonUgh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing.
Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind.
Waiting around to write
A Quote by Gertrude SteinIf you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.
The most important thing you do
An Article by Austin KleonFor the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece you’re working on right now, and the piece you’re working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence you’re working on right now.
Poison sniffers
An Article by Austin KleonChristopher Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”
Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”
This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.
Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…
Almanacs and cyclical time
An Article by Austin KleonI am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”
I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
An Essay by Toby ShorinDon't get me wrong
An Article by Austin KleonNo phrase makes me want to stop reading more. “Don’t get me wrong” is usually a tell — a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests I’m a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy. Either way, when I see “don’t get me wrong,” I start to suspect I’m reading a piece of writing that might not be worth my time.
If you find yourself using “don’t get me wrong,” I have a suggestion: Delete the phrase and rewrite what came before it so I don’t get you wrong.
Writing. By Tully Hansen
A Website by Tully HansenWrite Simply
An Essay by Paul GrahamI try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.
Telescopic Text
A Websitetelescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.
Re: Pointing at things
An Article by Robin RendleI think I’ve been darting around this question for a while now:
...I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, incentivized me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.
All that stuff is me pointing at me, pointing at a thing. But we should just get out of the way of the thing we’re pointing at!
The Age of the Essay
An Essay by Paul GrahamPolitics and the English Language
An Essay by George Orwell- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Who the fuck is Guy Debord?
An Article by Robin RendleZettelkasten
A Tool by Niklas LuhmannA zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.
Fragments of time
A Quote by Italo CalvinoLong novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Koya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
Every Website is an Essay
An Article by Robin Rendle"Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.
And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."
How to Think About Notes
An Article by Will DarwinHigh Cadence Thoughs
A Website by Ryan Dawidjan[I] personally wish blogging was more about peeking behind the curtain into one's mind rather than shipping a polished contained unit.
I am an explorer
A Quote by C.S. LewisI do not sit down at my desk to put into in verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind I would have no incentive or need to write about it. I am an explorer…We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
Eyes on the ground
A Quote by Akira KurosawaWhen you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you’ll get frustrated. I think writing is similar. You need to get used to the task of writing. You must make an effort to learn to regard it not as something painful but as routine.
The Mind of the Maker
Looking at man, [the author of Genesis] sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
Only in terms of other things
No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”; He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”.
The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things.
I mix it with two in my thought
It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.
“I mix it with two in my thought”; this is the statement of the fact of universal experience that the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form.
Towards a synthesis of experience
The artist does not recognise that the phrases of the creeds purport to be observations of fact about the creative mind as such, including his own; while the theologian, limiting the application of the phrases to the divine Maker, neglects to inquire of the artist what light he can throw upon them from his own immediate apprehension of truth. The confusion is as though two men were to argue fiercely whether there was a river in a certain district or whether, on the contrary, there was a measurable volume of H2O moving in a particular direction with an ascertainable velocity; neither having any suspicion that they were describing the same phenomenon.
Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialised metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian, or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move towards a synthesis of experience.
And these three are one
For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity.
"The right phrase"
How can we know that the Idea itself has any real existence apart from the Energy? Very strangely; by the fact that the Energy itself is conscious of referring all its acts to an existing and complete whole.
Quite simply, every choice of an episode, or a phrase, or a word is made to conform to a pattern of the entire book, which is revealed by that choice as already existing. This truth, which is difficult to convey in explanation, is quite clear and obvious in experience. It manifests itself plainly enough when the writer says or thinks: “That is, or is not, the right phrase”—meaning that it is a phrase which does or does not correspond to the reality of the Idea.
The argument carried on in a sphere
We need not allow ourselves to be abashed by any suggestion that the old metaphors are out of date and ought to be superseded. We have only to remember that they are, and always were, metaphors, and that they are still “living” metaphors so long as we use them to interpret direct experience. Metaphors only become dead when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life.
A diversity within its unity
The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity.
The work is what it means
It is desirable to bear in mind—when dealing with the human maker at any rate—that his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, “What did you mean by this book?” is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.
Writing for the stage
From experience I am inclined to think that one reason why writing for the stage is so much more interesting than writing for publication is the very fact that, when the play is acted, the free will of the actor is incorporated into the written character.
In conformity with its proper nature
If the characters and the situation are rightly conceived together, as integral parts of the same unity, then there will be no need to force them to the right solution of that situation. If each is allowed to develop in conformity with its proper nature, they will arrive of their own accord at a point of unity, which will be the same unity that pre-existed in the original idea.
This is my clamhood
It was said, sneeringly, by someone that if a clam could conceive of God, it would conceive of Him in the shape of a great, big clam. Naturally. And if God has revealed Himself to clams, it could only be under conditions of perfect clamhood, since any other manifestation would be wholly irrelevant to clam nature. By incarnation, the creator says in effect: “See! this is what my eternal Idea looks like in terms of my own creation; this is my manhood, this is my clamhood.
Only so much of the mind
Though the autobiography “is” the author in a sense in which his other works are not, it can never be the whole of the author. It is still a formal expression and bound by the limitations of all material form, so that though it is a true revelation it is only a partial revelation: it incorporates only so much of the mind as matter is capable of containing.
To know evil
For to know evil, for them, was to know it not by pure intelligence by by experience.
A time when time was not
Darkness cannot say: “I precede the coming light”, but there is a sense in which light can say, “Darkness preceded me”.
Doubtless there is an event, X, in the future, by reference to which we may say that we are at present in a category of Not-X, but until X occurs, the category of Not-X is without reality. Only X can give reality to Not-X; that is to say, Not-Being depends for its reality upon Being. In this way we may faintly see how the creation of Time may be said automatically to create a time when Time was not, and how the Being of God can be said to create a Not-Being that is not God.
These alien wills
Unfortunately his creation is only safe from the interference of other wills so long as it remains in his head. By materialising his poem—that is, by writing it down and publishing it, he subjects it to the impact of alien wills. These alien wills can, if they like, become actively aware of all the possible wrong words and call them into positive being. They can, for example, misquote, misinterpret, or deliberately alter the poem. This evil is contingent upon the poet’s original good: you cannot misquote a poem that is not there, and the poet is (in that sense) responsible for all subsequent misquotations of his work. But one can scarcely hold him guilty of them.
When we say we know Hamlet
When we say we “know Hamlet”, we do not mean merely that we can memorise the whole succession of words and events in Hamlet. We mean that we have in our minds an awareness of Hamlet as a complete whole—“the end in the beginning”. We can prove this by observing how differently we feel when seeing a performance of Hamlet on the one hand and an entirely new play on the other.
A fresh focus of power
The demand for “originality”—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed. This view is adopted, and perhaps carried to excess, by writers like T. S. Eliot, some of whose poems are a close web of quotations and adaptations, chosen for their associative value, or like James Joyce, who makes great use of the associative value of sounds and syllables.
Some secret stirring in the world
There is some secret stirring in the world,
A thought that seeks impatiently its word.To stand independent of himself
The creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.
What can be called a response
With living, though unconscious, matter, the creator must still adapt the work to the material, though here he experiences something that can without undue anthropomorphism be called a “response”; plants “respond” to cultivation and cross-fertilization in a sense rather different from that in which iron may be said to “respond” to hammering.
A passive beauty of right structure
The human maker, working in unself-conscious matter, receives no worship from his creatures, since their will is no part of his material; he can only receive the response of their nature, and he is alone in fault if that response is not forthcoming. If he tortures his material, if the stone looks unhappy when he has wrought it into a pattern alien to its own nature, if his writing is an abuse of language, his music a succession of unmeaning intervals, the helpless discomfort of his material universe is a reproach to him alone; similarly, if he respects and interprets the integrity of his material, the seemliness of the ordered work proclaims his praise, and his only, without will, but in a passive beauty of right structure.
Father-, son-, and ghost-ridden
We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively “father-ridden”, “son-ridden”, and “ghost-ridden”.
It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavour to impose the Idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that this is the whole of the work.
Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea.
The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea. Such a man may write with the tears streaming down his cheeks, and yet produce nothing but turgid rhetoric, flat insipidity, or the absurdities of an Amanda Ros.
Running into the sand
His whole creative history is that of great rivers running into the sand
Not as the scribblers
What writer whose trinity was strongly co-ordinated would even dream of revising his work to conform with the majority report of a committee? Those whose Idea is in full control are especially obstinate and impervious to criticism; for in speaking for the father they speak with authority and not as the scribblers.
Failure in the ghost
Whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure in Thought and failure in the son as a failure in Action, failure in the ghost is a failure in Wisdom—not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.
The unghosted are not unintelligent, nor yet idle or unskilled; it is simply that there are certain things which they do not know and seem incapable of knowing. Under the terms of our analogy, failure in the ghost is the characteristic failure of the unliterary writer and the inartistic artist.
A distressing trait of the unghosted is their complacency; they walk and talk, and do not know that they are dead. Neither, of course, are they alive to the deadness of their own creation. How should they be? Only the living can draw any distinction between death and life.
Violence to the very structure of our being
If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.
It will revenge itself in judgment
To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems of extreme difficulty, which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of—such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilised amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. This is particularly disconcerting to him, because he has been frequently told that the increase of scientific knowledge would give him “the mastery over nature”—which ought, surely, to imply mastery over life.
Perhaps the first thing that he can learn from the artist is that the only way of “mastering” one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself upon the domineering artist.
The solution of the age
The concept of “problem and solution” is as meaningless, applied to the act of creation, as it is when applied to the act of procreation. To add John to Mary in a procreative process does not produce a “solution” of John’s and Mary’s combined problem; it produces George or Susan, who (in addition to being a complicating factor in the life of his or her parents) possesses an independent personality with an entirely new set of problems.
...there is no strictly mathematical or detective-story sense in which it can be said that the works of a poet are the “solution” of the age in which he lived...The artist does not see life as a problem to be solved, but as a medium for creation.
That anything in this world should be inevitable
We do not so much fear the pains of dying, as feel affronted by the notion that anything in this world should be inevitable.
In a day and hour which we know not
“We are at work now upon various devices”, says some harassed spokesman; and the imagination sees “us” industriously assembling the device, as though it had been delivered in parts from a celestial workshop, and had only to be fitted together according to the book of instructions and put into use the same evening. That is not creation’s way. There is the wayward, the unpredictable, the not-to-be-commanded Idea, which may make its presence felt in the mind after long hours of fruitless thought and work, or suddenly after no thought at all, or after a long fallow period of unconsciousness, during which the conscious has been otherwise employed, but always in a day and an hour which we know not.
In terms which must be altered
[Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.
The unending labour of creation
Now the artist does not behave like this. He may finish a book, as we may finish a war or set up the machinery of a League, and he may think it is very good and allow his Energy a brief sabbath of repose. But he knows very well that this is only a pause in the unending labour of creation.
Each chapter concluded is only a day’s end in the course of the book; each book concluded is only a year’s end in the course of a life’s pilgrimage. Or, if you like the metaphor better, it is a “still” cut out and thrown off from the endless living picture which his creative mind reels out. It is a picture in itself, but it only leads from the picture behind it to the picture in front of it, as part of a connected process.
To see the fulfillment of the work
It is true that [the artist], like everybody else, derives remuneration from his work (though not, strictly speaking, profit in the financial sense, of the word, since what he invests in his work is not money but time and skill, whose returns cannot be calculated in percentages). The remuneration is frequently beyond the amount necessary to enable him to go on working. What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls “my own work”, and nine times out of ten, this means the same work (i.e. the exercise of his art) that he does for money. The peculiar charm of his escape is that he is relieved, not from the work but from the money.
What distinguishes him here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work.