On Good Writing

ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER

You describe your Wonderful Night very well. That is, you describe the place and the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the thing itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you’re bound to read it about ten years’ hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across . . . .

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “more people died,” don’t say “mortality rose.”

In writing, don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”: make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words, (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”: otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Letter to Joan Lancaster, June 26, 1956 (CL 3)

TO ANOTHER YOUNG WRITER

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

Turn off the radio.

Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about.)

Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

When you give up a bit of work, don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Letter to Thomasine, December 14, 1959 (CL 3)

A GOOD STORY DOESN’T NEED A “POINT”

I’m not quite sure what you meant about “silly adventure stories without any point.” If they are silly, then having a point won’t save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a “point” you mean some truth about the real world which one can take out of the story, I’m not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a “point” in that sense may prevent one from getting the real effect of the story in itself—like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn’t meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I’m not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

Letter to Phyllida, December 18, 1953 (CL 3)

GOOD WRITING DOES NOT NECESSARILY COME FROM A GOOD HEART

“The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well.”

The other thing we must not say is that Bunyan wrote well because he was a sincere, forthright man who had no literary affectations and simply said what he meant. I do not doubt that is the account of the matter that Bunyan would have given himself. But it will not do. If it were the real explanation, then every sincere, forthright, unaffected man could write as well. But most people of my age learned from censoring the letters of the troops, when we were subalterns in the First War, that unliterary people, however sincere and forthright in their talk, no sooner take a pen in hand than cliché and platitude flow from it. The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well. It is a moral virtue, not a literary talent. We may hope it is rewarded in a better world: it is not rewarded on Parnassus.

“The Vision of John Bunyan,” Selected Literary Essays

WAYS TO MURDER WORDS

“The greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.”

Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for “very,” tremendous for “great,” sadism for “cruelty,” and unthinkable for “undesirable” were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. Men often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its “selling quality.” Verbicide was committed when we exchanged Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative—useless synonyms for good or for bad . . . .

I am not suggesting that we can by an archaizing purism repair any of the losses that have already occurred. It may not, however, be entirely useless to resolve that we ourselves will never commit verbicide. If modern critical usage seems to be initiating a process which might finally make adolescent and contemporary mere synonyms for bad and good—and stranger things have happened—we should banish them from our vocabulary. I am tempted to adapt the couplet we see in some parks:

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,

That there was meaning here before you came.

Introduction, Studies in Words

THE POWER OF STYLE

You have started the question of prose style in your letter and ask whether it is anything more than the “literal meaning of the words.” On the contrary, it means less—it means the words themselves. For every thought can be expressed in a number of different ways: and style is the art of expressing a given thought in the most beautiful words and rhythms of words. For instance, a man might say, “When the constellations which appear at early morning joined in musical exercises and the angelic spirits loudly testified to their satisfaction.” Expressing exactly the same thought, the Authorized [King James] Version says, “When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Thus by the power of style, what was nonsense becomes ineffably beautiful.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 4, 1917 (CL 1)

IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY

This is one of the privileges of art, that all things are in common: imitation, if it is forgotten, matters not, and, if it lives, is justified and does not diminish the originality of the borrower. The notion of literary property was brought by philistines from the valley of the gorribeen-men into Helicon where it has no weight nor meaning. All poetry is one, and I love to see the great notes repeated. Homer and Virgil wrote lines not for their own works alone but for the use of all their followers. A plague on these moderns scrambling for what they call originality—like men trying to lift themselves off the earth by pulling at their own braces [suspenders]: as if by shutting their eyes to the work of the masters they were likely to create new things themselves.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 7, 1920 (CL 1)

THE PARADOX OF ORIGINALITY

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

“Membership,” The Weight of Glory

HOW TO DEVELOP A STYLE

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right, the readers will most certainly go into it.

“Cross-Examination,” God in the Dock

SUITING THE STYLE TO YOUR READERS

About precocity, this isn’t a change in my style. I have always had two ways of writing, one for the people (to be used in works of popularized theology) and one that never aimed at simplicity (in scholarly or imaginative works). I don’t think I could, or ought, to write romances and fantasies in the style of my broadcast talks. And I’m impenitent about dindle. You saw at once what it meant and so I’ve added a lovely word to your vocabulary. Why do you object?

Letter to Mrs. E. L. Baxter, August 19, 1947 (CL 2)

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 14, 1916 (CL 1)

It is impossible to write one’s best if nobody else ever has a look at the result.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 20, 1916 (CL 1)

LET READERS TASTE FOR THEMSELVES

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all . . . .

This, which is eminently true of poetry, is true of all imaginative writing. One of the first things we have to say to a beginner who has brought us his manuscript is, “Avoid all epithets which are merely emotional. It is no use telling us that something was ‘mysterious’ or ‘loathsome’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘voluptuous.’ Do you think your readers will believe you just because you say so? You must go quite a different way to work. By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim ‘how mysterious!’ or ‘loathsome’ or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavor.”

“At the Fringe of Language,” Studies in Words

THE MORE ABSTRACT THE TOPIC, THE LESS ABSTRACT THE PROSE

I hope this doesn’t all sound too pedantic. But the matter is important. So many people, when they begin “research,” lose all desire, and presently all power, of writing clear, sharp, and unambiguous English. Hold on to your finite transitive verb, your concrete nouns, and the muscles of language (but, though, for, because etc.). The more abstract the subject, the more our language should avoid all unnecessary abstraction. Write mysteriously and elusively about a drawing room if you please: but write about mysteries as like Cobbett (or Hume) as you can!

Letter to Francis Warner, July 15, 1959 (CL 3)

FAULTS IN UNDERGRADUATE LITERARY ESSAYS

The faults I find in contemporary undergraduate criticism are these: (1) In adverse criticism their tone is that of personal resentment. They are more anxious to wound the author than to inform the reader. Adverse criticism should diagnose and exhibit faults, not abuse them. (2) They are far too ready to advance or accept radical reinterpretations of works which have already been before the world for several generations. The prima facie improbability that those have never till now been understood is ignored. (3) Most European literature was composed for adult readers who knew the Bible and the classics. It is not the modern student’s fault that he lacks this background; but he is insufficiently aware of his lack and of the necessity for extreme caution which it imposes on him. He should think twice before discovering “irony” in passages which everyone has hitherto taken “straight.” (4) He approaches literature with the wrong kind of seriousness. He uses as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy works which were intended as divertissements. The nature of the comic is a subject for serious consideration; but one needs to have seen the joke and taken it as a joke first. Of course none of these critical vices are peculiar to undergraduates. They imitate that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.

Letter to the Cambridge Broadsheet, March 9, 1960 (CL 3)

ON PLAGIARISM

I only once detected a pupil offering me someone else as his own work. I told him I was not a detective nor even a schoolmaster, nor a nurse, and that I absolutely refused to take any precaution against this puerile trick: that I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom. He went down of his own accord the next week and I never saw him again. I think you ought to make a general announcement of that sort . . . .

What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labor of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own.

Letter to Alastair Fowler, December 10, 1959 (CL 3)

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