Writers often give advice to other writers, while throwing in a few barbed comments about the perceived vexations of the writer’s life. Cyril Connelly cited “the pram in the hall” as one reason why writers fail to flourish, while Virginia Wolf described the necessity, for women writers, of “a room of one’s own“. Samuel Johnson advised writers to “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out” (the shorter version, the slogan for the T-shirt, would be “slaughter your darlings”)
The secret of writing, according to Sinclair Lewis, Nora Roberts, Robert Benchley, Stephen King, Oliver Stone and other luminaries, is to “apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”. Perspiration, then, rather than inspiration. If you wait for inspiration to strike, you may be waiting a long time (while intimating that the ability to string words together coherently is a ‘gift’ over which we have no control). My favourite quote, also attributed to a number of different witers, is this... “Writing a book is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo”.
Licenced today: Boarbank Hall near Grange-over-Sands...
No comments:
Post a Comment