The Art of Writing

There are always professional readers with publishing houses whose business is to attend to the commas, semi-colons and split infinitives.  On the other hand no amount of grammatical or literary polish can make a writer if he neglects the cultivation of a literary personality.

The style is the man.  Style is not a method, a system or even a decoration for one’s writing.  It is but the total impression that the reader gets of the quality of the writers mind, his depth or superficiality, his insight or lack of insight and other qualities like wit, humor, biting sarcasm, genial understanding, tenderness, delicacy of understanding, kindly cynism or cynical kindliness, hard headedness, practical common sense and general attitude towards things.  It is clear that there can be no handbook for developing a “humorous technique” or “three hour course in cynical kindness”, or “fifteen rules for practical common sense” and “eleven rules for delicacy of feeling”.

Clear thoughts expressed in unclear language are the style of a confirmed bachelor. He never has to explain anything to a wife. One never learns anything from a book when he hates the author. A man’s character is partly born and so is his style.  The other part is just contamination. A man without a favorite author is a lost soul.  He remains an unimpregnated ovum and unfertilized pistil.  One’s favorite author or literary lover is pollen for his soul. A favorite author exists in the world for everyman, only he hasn’t taken the trouble to find him. A book is like a picture of life or of a city. The universe is one big book and life is one big school.  The wise man read both book and life.

A good reader turns an author inside out like a beggar turning his coat inside out in search of fleas. The best way of studying any object is to begin by reading books, taking an unfavorite point of view with regard to it. A writer always has an instinctive interest in words as such.  Every word has a life and a personality, usually not recorded by a dictionary.

 A specialist graduates into a scholar when his knowledge broadens and a writer graduates into a thinker when his wisdom deepens.  A scholar’s writings consist of borrowing from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a scholar he appears.  A thinker’s writings consist of borrowing from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is more he depends on his own intestinal juice.  A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth.  A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us, not mulberry leaves but silk.

There is a period of gestation of ideas before writing, like the period of gestation of an embryo in its mother’s womb before birth.  When one’s favorite author has kindled the spark in one’s soul and set up current of live ideas in him, that is the “impregnation” when a man rushes into print before his ideas go through this period of gestation, that is diarrhea, mistaken for birth pains.  When a writer sells his conscience and writes things against his convictions, that is artificial abortions and the embryo is always still born.  When a writer feels violent convulsions like an electric storm in his head, and he doesn’t feel happy until he gets the ideas out of his system and puts them down on paper and feels an immense relief, that is literary birth.  Hence a writer feels a maternal affection towards his literary product as a mother feels towards her baby.  Hence writing is always better when it is one’s own, and a woman is always lovelier when she is somebody else’s wife.

The thing called “self” or “personality” consists of a bundle of limbs, muscles, nerves, reason, sentiments, culture understanding, experience, and prejudices.  It partly nature and partly culture, partly born and partly cultivated.  One’s nature is determined at the time of his birth, or even before it.  Some are naturally hard-hearted and mean; others are naturally frank and straight forward and chivalrous and big-hearted, and again others are naturally soft and weak in character, or given over to worries.  Such qualities are in ones “marrow-bones” and the best teacher or wisest parent cannot change one type of personality.

Other qualities are acquired after death through education and experience, but in so far as one’s thoughts and ideas and impressions come from the most diverse sources and different streams of influence at different periods of his life, his ideas, prejudices and points of view presents a most bewildering inconsistency.  One loves dogs and afraid of cats, while another loves cats and is afraid of dogs.  Hence the study of types of human personality is the most complicated of all sciences.

The school of self expression demands that we express in writing only our own thoughts and feelings, our genuine loves, genuine hatreds, genuine fears and genuine hobbies.  These will be expressed without any attempt to hide the bad from the good, without fear of being ridiculed by the world, and without fear of contracting the ancient sages or contemporary authorities. Literary beauty is only expressiveness. I love a liar more than a speaker of truth and an indiscreet liar more than a discreet one.  His indiscretion is a sign of his love for his readers.

I trust an indiscreet fool and suspect a lawyer. The indiscreet fool is a nation’s best diplomat.  He wins peoples heart.

What is Beauty 

The thing called beauty in literature and beauty in things depends so much on change and movement and is based on life.  What lives always has change and movement, and what has change and movement naturally has beauty.

Literary beauty of things arises from their nature, and those that fulfill their nature clothe themselves in beautiful lines.  Therefore, beauty of line and form is intrinsic and not extrinsic. The horse’s hoofs are designed for a quick gallop, the tiger’s claws are designed for piercing on this prey, the stork legs are designed for wading across swamps, and the bear’s paws are designed for walking on ice.  Does the horse, the tiger, the stork or the bear ever think of its beauty of forms and proportions?  All it tries to do is function in life and adapt a proper posture for movement.  But from our point of view, we see the horse’s hoop, the tiger’s claws, the stork’s legs and the bear’s paws have a striking beauty, either in their fullness of contour and suggestion of power, or in their slenderness and strength of line or in their clearness of outlines, or in the ruggedness of their joints.  Their beauty comes from their posture or movement and their bodily shapes are the results of their bodily functions, and this is also the secret of beauty in writing.