LETTER TO
A YOUNG WRITER
By Albert
H. Morehead
September
1, 1957
I don't
know whether or not writing is a disease with you. You probably don't know
either. If it is, you are helpless anyway, like those whose diseases are music
or medicine or money‑making or anything else on the list, down to much of
a muchness. I've had the writing disease since I was about eleven, and while I
don't like it any more I haven't found the remedy if any. If it isn't a disease
with you it can still be a pleasant and sometimes profitable hobby. Of course,
all writers and in fact all practitioners of all arts suffer from frustration.
Even the so‑called successful ones. Some have achieved artistic but not
popular acceptance and are sure they could have sold millions of books if only
they had had the time and taken the trouble, and others have made money but
gotten no critical acclaim and they are sure they could have created true art
too if only publishers and editors hadn't kept bombarding them with orders for
well‑paid hackwriting. There are a handful of exceptions, Hemingway,
Heifetz, Horowitz — apparently we now shift from the M's to the H’s.
If you do
have any thought of writing for a living, I can help you. If you don't you can
skip the next few paragraphs, but that wouldn't be human so you won't anyway.
My rules for writing have never been published and in fact this is the first
time I've ever written them down. I keep them as a strictly commercial asset;
if I gave them to my competitors, most of whom have more talent than I, my poor
family would soon be starving. Like the recipes of French chefs and the trade
secrets of the ancient guilds, they are to be handed down from generation to
generation within the family. You, being of the family, qualify. My rules turn
out to be a series of “don'ts" but they are not actually negative. In this
case the negative mode of expression turned out to be more convenient and also
it implies the existence of exceptions.
The first
don't: Don't kid yourself. You want to sell what you write and if you write
books you want people to buy them, Nothing is more damaging psychologically or
to one's writing career than to take comfort in belonging to an avant garde or
lunatic‑fringe group that glorifies the esoteric. Truly great writing has
universality of appeal, anyway.
Don't be
self‑conscious about your writing. Write down everything that comes to
mind, no matter how much it makes you blush. You can always throw it away before
anybody else sees it. Many a girl who can write a really delightful letter to
her sister or her parents will freeze when she sits down to write something for
publication. She will be so afraid of writing something bad that she will sit
indecisively before her typewriter and write nothing. Professional writing
depends on output. Some of your worst paragraphs will yield some of your best
sentences. If you don't know how to start, start anyway. You can rewrite
something you've written, but you can't do anything with something you haven't
written.
Don't
separate subject and verb if you can help it, and in no case separate them more
than you have to. This is basic to clarity yet almost never fully understood or
properly expressed. It isn't a matter of short sentences vs. long sentences,
you can make a sentence almost as long as you wish and still not sacrifice easy
reading if you get the subject and the verb together. Time after time editors
have sent me for rewriting some article that had good material but seemed
unduly involved, and all I had to do to fix it was to get the subjects and the
verbs together. It isn't a cure‑all, it isn't the secret of good writing,
but it's a very good rule.
Don't
start sentences with participial phrases. For one thing, participial phrases
are almost never correctly used — for the simple reason that there are so
few cases in which they can be correctly used. Dilettante writers usually have
the notion that participial phrases add variety. If so, it is at too great
sacrifice. Most often the result is a dangling participle or a non sequitur. A
correct use might be, "Born in 1743, he became a typical 18th‑century
dandy…" More often you will read, "Born in 1743, he studied at Oxford
and then…" Obviously there is no connection. It is safer and usually more
elegant to say, "He was born in 1743 and… Then the reader need not pause
and look for the connection. Whether or not he can find it, the writing has
become lees effective.
Don't be
afraid to repeat words. Read Fowler on the subject. Repetition is a crime only
to newspaper reporters and bad writers. If a word is proper to express your
meaning it is the right word, no matter how often you have used it before. An
unnecessary change of words where there is no intended change of meaning will
cause the reader to pause and look for a distinction in sense, and again the
writing has become less effective,
Both of
the foregoing paragraphs have a kinship to the next don't, which is: Don't make
the reader stop and think anymore often than is necessary. Any involved
sentence, obscure idea or unfamiliar word will interfere with the smoothness of
the reading, which is almost synonymous with the smoothness of the writing. It
isn't quite true that you should always use the shorter word, though I can hardly
imagine a case in which a good writer would say purchase when he means buy;
nevertheless, the longer word is sometimes more euphonious and if so you should
use it even if it seems pretentious. Also, there are cases in which partial
obscurity is properly used to create a mood. That is why I said "more
often than is necessary." Overuse of such devices will make you hard
reading and unless you have transcendent genius, like Faulkner perhaps, you
will lose your readers.
It is
natural enough to be confused about life and thoughts and emotions and all the
other imponderables, and perhaps we are more confused when we are young,
perhaps we remain confused all our lives but simply learn better to submit to
the confusion as we grow older. It has been a modern vogue, for fifty years or
so, to express the confusion in words, on canvas, etc., and pass it along to
one's audience. In my opinion that is not a proper function of any form of
artistic expression, but certainly it is not a proper function of writing. The writer's
greatest service lies in translating the substance from confusion to clarity.
If he cannot do this he will appeal only to those who are subjectively
interested in him, his problems, and his attitudes, and there will seldom be
enough such persons to make a best‑seller.
This leads
me to a corollary don't: Don't be sorrier for your characters than they are for
themselves. Especially in the short story, it seems to be considered essential
that all be stark and sad. Any aspect of happiness and good fortune removes the
story from the realm of true art. Such an approach is artificial and
fallacious. Steinbeck in The Grapes of
Wrath, which you have probably read, avoided the fallacy very skillfully.
He was writing about unfortunate people and he had the undisguised object of
creating sympathy for them, but every now and then his characters cast off
their mantle of woe and had a thoroughly enjoyable session of dancing and song
and fun. A fiction‑writer should follow a kind of Stanislavski system,
actually being each character, and if he does this well he will remember that
no normal human being can manage to be unhappy all the time. Comedy relief
isn't merely a device of the movies, it is a fact of life.
Don't seek
individuality by trying to be different. One learns to write by reading. Change
for the sake of change and difference for the sake of difference defeat their
own purpose. You can be a good writer without ever departing from the
techniques of other writers, simply by applying these techniques to your own
ideas and experiences. Inspiration and talent, if you have them, will provide
your individual contributions with no voluntary or conscious effort on your
part. It you should happen to come up with as little as ninety percent borrowed
and as much as ten percent your own, you will have made a considerable
contribution. I might almost have said ninety‑nine percent and one
percent.
Learn good
English style if you possibly can. I mean such artificialities as uniformity of
treatment in parallel constructions, not using "over" when you mean
"more than" or like" when you mean "as," and avoidance
of such rhetorical crimes as tautology. You may not be able to reconcile the
rigid rules with a rational spirit, but if you are going to write for the
market you will have to sell to editors, and editors are pedantic, and the
First Law of professional writing is, "Write to please the editor, to hell
with the reader.” Style‑consciousness is a special aptitude. You may not
have it, and you don't have to have it to be a successful and even a great
writer. When you don't have it, you can hire it. The offices of publishing
firms are full of subeditors who know style backwards and forwards and will
never write anything worth publishing. I have bought hundreds of articles from
college professors, including professors of English, and there aren't five in a
hundred who can write three consecutive sentences without an error in grammar
or style. Nevertheless it pays to know the copybook rules, if only so that you
will depart from them only deliberately.
My
heavens, I haven't rambled on like this for years. It was a pleasure to write
it, even if you don't read it.
Yours,
Albert