by Mardy Grothe
At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer,
I found that the creative heat which at eighteen
had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame
had flickered out to a dim pilot light
registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided.
It was not that I no longer wanted to write,
I still yearned passionately to produce the novel
which had been for so long captive in my brain.
It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs,
I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s
remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—
I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour.
When you are trying to generate ideas with traction for a mind that has been spinning its wheels, there are few better methods than walking away from your writing table, picking up a book from a favorite author, reading for a while, and then reflecting on what you’ve read. It’s like priming a pump. You pour a little water in, begin pumping on the handle like mad, and the water often starts gushing out. Of course, by reading the works of other writers, you always run the risk of inadvertently pilfering a phrase or two, but it’s probably a risk worth taking. And if you’re ever accused of leaning on others for your ideas, my recommendation is to plead guilty. It might be called the Thornton Wilder Defense after his remark:
I do borrow from other writers, shamelessly! I can only say in my defense,
like the woman brought before the judge on a charge of kleptomania,
“I do steal, but, your Honor, only from the very best stores.”
Another remedy for those who are having trouble writing is to begin talking. There’s something about thinking out loud—whether done to a friend, aloud to oneself, or into a tape recorder—that gets the juices flowing again. Robert Frost said it this way:
Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house.
Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.
No matter how ideas come—by flash, incubation, larceny, or pressure release—they must be turned into words before they can be turned into literature. This is where the actual task of writing begins. And as long as there have been writers, there have been people advising them how to do it. The first great writing advice book was The Elements of Style, a 1918 guide by William Strunk, Jr., a professor of English at Cornell University. Strunk, who believed that writers used too many words to express their ideas, advocated an economy of style. “Omit needless words,” he advised. “Vigorous writing is concise.” And then he wrote:
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,
a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines
and a machine no unnecessary parts.
This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short,
or that he avoid all detail…but that every word tell.
In 1959, E. B. White of The New Yorker magazine—and a student of Professor Strunk’s forty years earlier—came out with a revised and updated edition of The Elements of Style. The writing world, hungry for a new style guide, gobbled up over ten million copies of Strunk & White—as it was called—over the next forty years. In the new edition, White continued the tradition of phrasing prescriptive writing advice in dramatic metaphorical ways:
Avoid the use of qualifiers. Rather, very, little, pretty—
these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.
Strunk and White were not the first people in history to use fanciful metaphorical imagery while providing writing advice. The nineteenth-century English poet Robert Southey was a critic of elaborate writing and the champion of a lean, vigorous style. He wrote:
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—
the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
While there are wide differences of opinion as to the role of ideas in writing—or even what constitutes good writing—a definite consensus has emerged among writers when it comes to critics and reviewers. In his 1930 book On Literature, Maxim Gorky provides an extraordinary passage from Anton Chekhov, who begins with a simple but spectacular simile:
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil.
But then Chekhov takes off on an unexpected, but equally spectacular, flight of fancy. It’s a bit lengthy, but I think you’ll enjoy the full passage:
The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings,
and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging.
The horse’s skin quivers, it waves its tail.
What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn’t know itself.
It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt—
“I’m alive, too, you know!” it seems to say.
“Look, I know how to buzz, there’s nothing I can’t buzz about!”
I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and
can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice.
The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky,
who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t take such a harsh view of critics, once even calling them “sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.” But he didn’t view them all favorably:
Some critics are like chimneysweepers;
they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from the nests above;
they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot,
and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders,
and then sing out from the top of the house, as if they had built it.
At the end of this chapter, I will provide a compilation titled “Writers on Critics & Reviewers: A Metaphorical Potpourri.” In that section you will find a few dozen additional things writers have said about critics—all negative, and all metaphorical.
Before we get to that, though, let’s begin this final chapter of the book by featuring more analogies, metaphors, and similes about the literary life.
The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue.
You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others, and finally for money.
MARCEL ACHARD
Achard was a French writer whose play The Idiot was made into the Hollywood film A Shot in the Dark (with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau). A similar observation has been attributed to Moliére: “Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”
Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.
JEAN ANOUILH
It is easy to write a check if you have enough money in the bank,
and writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
SHOLEM ASCH
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Asimov was one of history’s most prolific authors, with over five hundred books to his credit. He once wrote, “I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.”
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned
than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
BERNARD BARUCH
Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes.
SYLVIA BEACH
Just as there is nothing between
the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
HILAIRE BELLOC
That is, with omelettes and autobiog
raphies, either they’re great, or they stink.
With a novelist, like a surgeon,
you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands—
someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
SAUL BELLOW
Conversation is the legs on which thought walks;
and writing, the wings by which it flies.
MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON
I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower,
for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
JOHN BURROUGHS
In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same metaphor to make a slightly different point: “Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.”
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
EDMUND BURKE
Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.
ROY CAMPBELL
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
ALBERT CAMUS
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade,
just as painting does, or music.
If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them.
Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The American writer B. J. (Beatrice Joy) Chute, who taught creative writing at Barnard College for many years, wrote similarly: “Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.”
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine
with a lamp on your forehead,
a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything,
whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion,
whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
BLAISE CENDRARS
Anaïs Nin agreed: “To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.” And James Baldwin put it this way: “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
JEAN COCTEAU
Authors are sometimes like tomcats:
they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.
MALCOLM COWLEY
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
QUENTIN CRISP
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace
and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,”
and then he passes the hat.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity,
and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen
by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
The author who speaks about his own books is almost
as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Employing a similar metaphor, Alex Haley of Roots fame wrote: “I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn’t make me love the less successful one any less.”
Writing is like driving at night in the fog.
You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Is writing a disease, or a cure? Graham Greene wrote, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness…which is inherent in a human situation.”
It is with publishers as with wives: one always wants somebody else’s.
NORMAN DOUGLAS
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE
Cut out all those exclamation marks.
An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
This is the most famous simile on the subject of exclamation marks, but it’s not the only one. In a 1976 Punch article, Miles Kingston wrote, “So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.”
It’s splendid to be a great writer, to put men into
the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
I am irritated by my writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true,
but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sounds he hears within.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
This is from an 1845 letter Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet. In another letter to her, he wrote: “I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.”
Word carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry:
you must join your sentences smoothly.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The most technologically efficient machine
that man has ever invented is the book.
NORTHROP FRYE
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
ROBERT GRAVES
Graves, a celebrated poet, wrote novels and non-fiction works to finance the publication of his poetry, an arrangement he expresses so exquisitely here.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history,
on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
PHILIP GUEDALLA
Guedalla, an English barrister who gave up a legal career in 1913 to pursue his interest in history and biography, went on to write more than thirty books. He also wrote: “Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.”
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
I started out very quietly and I beat Mr. Turgenev.
Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant.
I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal,
and I think I had the edge in the last one.
But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy
unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
This well-known boxing analogy appeared in a 1950 New Yorker profile that Lillian Ross did on Hemingway. The comment was not well received by critics, who viewed it as grandiose. In the interview, Hemingway also used a few baseball metaphors. He said, “I learned my knuckle-ball” from Baudelaire and he added that Flaubert “always threw them perfectly straight, hard, high, and inside.” He also compared a writer to a starting baseball pitcher, saying a novelist “has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom;
some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Writing a novel, like making chicken soup or making love,
is an idiosyncratic occupation; probably no two people do it the same way.
SUSAN ISAACS
Footnotes—little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
WILLIAM JAMES
This may be the best thing ever written about footnotes; but a serious rival comes from Nöel Coward: “Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of yo
ur life.
LAWRENCE KASDAN
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
JOHN KEATS
Liking a writer and then meeting the writer
is like liking goose liver and then meeting the goose.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
I’m like a big old hen.
I can’t cluck too long about the egg I’ve just laid
because I’ve got five more inside me pushing to get out.
LOUIS L’AMOUR
L’Amour also wrote, “A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.”
Magazines all too frequently lead to books
and should be regarded as the heavy petting of literature.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
NORMAN MAILER
The writer Walker Percy might have been thinking about Mailer’s observation when he wrote: “Somebody compared novel-writing to having a baby, but for me it is the conception which is painful and the delivery which is easy.”
In literature as in love we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
You expect far too much of a first sentence.
Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast:
what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb
and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
LARRY MCMURTRY
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved
and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
H.L. MENCKEN
Mencken realized that not all authors viewed the process of writing in this way. He once wrote, “The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.”
