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Lesson 39 |
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What every writer wants |
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How do professional writers ignore what they were taught at school about writing? |
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I have known very few writers, |
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but those I have known and whom I respect, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going when they first set pen to paper. |
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They have a character, perhaps two; |
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they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun; |
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one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, |
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then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. |
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I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at school. |
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In the breaking and remaking, in the timing interweaving, beginning afresh, |
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the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began. |
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This organic process, |
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often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. |
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A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another and it is gone |
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but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. |
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Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. |
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I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books; |
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like adolescents they stand before the mirror, |
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and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. |
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For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, |
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winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, |
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begging response from those around them. |
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Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. |
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He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore. |
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This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, |
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to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please. |
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A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back |
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that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. |
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For this reason also the writer, like any other artist, |
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has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort, |
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no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within. |
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A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; |
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he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, |
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and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, |
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from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point. |