Writers are commonly called wordsmiths, but it might be more accurate to call them ideasmiths, for they live in a world of ideas as much as of words. In 1890, French writer Paul Bourget expressed the importance of ideas in an analogy:
Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.
For many creative people, ideas are like a flash flood, arriving without advance warning and carrying everything along with it. It can be a frenzied process, and there is always the danger that the torrent will engulf a writer, who is trying to put the key elements of the idea into words before it exits the mind. This may have been what F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he once wrote in a letter to his daughter:
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
At one time or another, all writers have tried to describe the process of transforming ideas into words on a page. But nobody has ever captured the drama better than Honoré de Balzac:
Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army
to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.
Memories charge in, bright flags on high;
the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop;
the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges;
flashes of wit pop up like sharpshooters;
forms and shapes and characters rear up;
the paper is spread with ink.
Many writers subscribe to the theory that ideas come with the charge of an explosive. In an 1857 letter to a friend, Henry David Thoreau wrote:
New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors,
with a flash and an explosion,
and perhaps somebody’s castle-roof perforated.
And in his 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote:
An idea, to be suggestive, must come
to the individual with the force of revelation.
While some ideas arrive with the power of a thunderbolt, others announce themselves in a soft whisper, barely able to be heard. Still others resemble a seed that must be nurtured before it germinates. This more subtle and tender process was described by Ernest Hemingway in a 1929 conversation with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald:
When I have an idea, I turn down the flame,
as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go.
Then it explodes and that is my idea.
In yet another variation, ideas sometimes multiply rapidly:
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.
And sometimes they need to be coaxed before they give up their secrets:
An idea, like a ghost…must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
While some writers struggle with the problem of too many ideas, others despair over having too few. In a 1752 letter to a friend, Horace Walpole put it this way:
Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.
Every writer has experienced a literary drought—most commonly called a writer’s block—and almost all have tried to describe it. But few descriptions of the phenomenon can rival a passage that appears on the very first page of William Styron’s 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice. The words come from Stingo, the protagonist, who has recently lost his job as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. It is 1947, and Stingo, two years out of the military, has moved from Virginia to New York to pursue a writing career. Now, living in a Brooklyn rooming house, he is out of work, almost out of money, and in the middle of serious dry spell—a condition he describes masterfully:
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.
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.
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.
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
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.
Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes.
Just as there is nothing between
the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
That is, with omelettes and autobiographies, 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.
Conversation is the legs on which thought walks;
and writing, the wings by which it flies.
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.
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.
Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
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.
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.
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.
Authors are sometimes like tomcats:
they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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.
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.
The author who speaks about his own books is almost
as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
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.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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.
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
Cut out all those exclamation marks.
An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
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.
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.
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.
The most technologically efficient machine
that man has ever invented is the book.
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing a novel, like making chicken soup or making love,
is an idiosyncratic occupation; probably no two people do it the same way.
Footnotes—little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
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 your life.
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
Liking a writer and then meeting the writer
is like liking goose liver and then meeting the goose.
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.
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.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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.
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.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved
and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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.”
The structure of a play is always
the story of how the birds came home to roost.
The more familiar metaphor is chickens coming home to roost, but it means the same thing—our deeds and choices come back to haunt us, like chickens returning to the henhouse each night. The idea was first expressed in 1810 by English poet Robert Southey: “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.” It’s also what Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind in his famous “banquet of consequences” line, which we examined earlier.
Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
True ease in writing comes from Art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.
Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter,
open up a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop.
This is the best known of the analogies that view writing as a kind of blood-letting. The first articulation of the idea came from Sydney Smith, who said of the nineteenth-century English politician Henry Fox: “Fox wrote drop by drop.” A popular variation on the theme comes from the American screenwriter Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country.
And for that reason, no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway.
Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies,
at others the churned-up mud of the road.
Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.
Authors are actors, books are theaters.
Along the same lines, Rod Serling wrote, “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child.
Write while the heat is in you.
The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts
uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.
He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
A sentence should read as if its author,
had he held a plough instead of a pen,
could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
A writer judging his own work is like a deceived husband—
he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.
Robert Traver is the pen name of John D. Voelker, a Michigan lawyer who was a prosecuting attorney before becoming a Michigan Supreme Court Justice. He wrote many books reflecting his two passions—the law and flyfishing—but is best remembered for the 1958 book Anatomy of a Murder.
Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom
and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water;
but everybody likes water.
Twain wrote this in an 1887 letter to a friend, but the idea first occurred to him two years earlier. An 1885 journal entry, written exactly this way, went as follows: “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”
The instruction we find in books is like fire.
We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home,
communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
It is with books as with men;
a very small number play a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.
On the books that have played a great part, the American poet and writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich observed: “Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.”
I can never understand how two men can write a book together;
to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—
he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in.
Delay is instinctive with him.
He waits for the surge…that will carry him along.
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners.
Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick;
only amateurs believe in inspiration.
Edna Ferber said similarly: “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill, and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
Writing is thinking on paper.
WRITERS ON CRITICS & REVIEWERS: A METAPHORICAL POTPOURRI
The poison pens of writers have been directed at many targets over the years, but never more venomously than when aimed at critics and reviewers. A sampling of the best appear below.
American critics are like American universities.
They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
Reviewers are, as Coleridge declared,
a species of maggots, inferior to bookworms,
living on the delicious brains of real genius.
A critic is a bundle of biases held
loosely together by a sense of taste.
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night,
they see how it should be done every night,
but they can’t do it themselves.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic.
No more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
And, of course, with the birth of the artist
came the inevitable afterbirth—the critic.
Critics…
Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.
Critics…are of two sorts:
those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty,
and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist,
in the same way that a man becomes an informer
when he cannot be a soldier.
Don’t be dismayed by
the opinions of editors, or critics.
They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
Critical lice are like body lice,
which desert corpses to seek the living.
What a blessed thing it is that nature,
when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing
clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live.
It is the same with critics—
they desire our blood, not our pain.
Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics
is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions,
are a most stupid and malignant race.
As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair,
so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
A poet that fails in writing becomes often a morose critic;
the weak and insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar.
A bad review is like baking a cake
with all the best ingredients
and having someone sit on it.
The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg
in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.
A critic is a man who knows
the way but can’t drive the car.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry
as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
I have long felt that any reviewer
who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous.
He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor
and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
Critics are like the brushers of noblemen’s clothes.
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.