“It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything apposite and exigent to say, but simply because it seems easy.”
That is the start of H. L. Mencken’s essay “Authorship as a Trade” (reprinted in Prejudices: Fifth Series).
I have been teaching for over a quarter of a century now. What has been the hardest thing to teach students? Not even a contest. I have never figured out how to convince students that writing well is hard work.
I can’t fault the students too much; I didn’t discover that writing well was hard work until after I graduated from college. My economics professor Tom Mayer did his best to teach me this, but I did not absorb the lesson. I remember my shock in class one day when he asked students to raise a hand if they ever struggled trying to find the right word to use in a sentence. One or two students raised their hands. I was not one of them. He then said, “Those of you who raised your hand might be good writers. The rest of you are not.” Truth be told, I was a bit indignant.
What Eliot called the intolerable wrestle with words and meaning is a real thing if you want to write well. There is a myth that some people are just naturally gifted prose stylists, that ever since they were born they have this supernatural ability to sit down and observe impeccable prose pouring forth. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (edited by Robert DeMott) is a marvelous demonstration that writing is hard even for good writers.
When Steinbeck set out to write The Grapes of Wrath, he started a daily journal in which he would record how he was feeling at the outset of every day. It is a remarkable view of the craft of writing. Four and a half months into the process, Steinbeck, acknowledging that he is going to have to revisit the work of the last several months to fix words and tone, exclaims, “Sorry, but I could hardly be expected to whip out finished copy.” Remember, this is a diary—he is apologizing to himself.
The diary has one recurrent theme: Despair.
“I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.”
“This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.”
“Maybe I was silly to think I could write such a long book without stopping. I can’t. Or rather I couldn’t. I’ll try to go on now.”
“I’m getting worried about this book. I wish it were done. I’m afraid I’m botching it. I think it would be a good thing to stop and think about it but I hate to lose the time. But I want it to be good and I’m afraid it is slipping. But I must remember that it always seems that way when it is well along.”
“…I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped I would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.”
This awful run-of-the-mill book, botched by an inadequate failure of a writer, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and was a large part of why Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize. Yet, in writing it, Steinbeck was unrelentingly in a state of despair at his failures as a writer. As Tom Mayer noted, that is the mark of someone who might be a good writer.
How did Steinbeck manage to write the novel despite his constant sense that he was failing? That is the other theme which runs throughout the diary: Discipline.
“The failure of will for even one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language. And sadly enough, if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers.”
“But I’ve got to go on and think of nothing but this book. I’m behind now and I want not to lose any more time, and so I simply must go on. It’s good to work even if the absolute drive isn’t in you.”
“…I must reestablish the discipline. Must get tough.”
“My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it. Have no discipline any more. I must get back.”
“I have been remiss and lazy, my concentration I have permitted to go under the line of effort….My job is to get down to it and now. For all the pressures, there is only one person to blame and I must force him into it.”
Putting it together, writing well is an act of seeming futility which breeds despair. The only way to write well is to endure that despair by sheer will and discipline. Just keep writing. Write bad sentences and bad paragraphs. Then wrote some more bad paragraphs and bad sentences. And bit by bit, some of those sentences will become better sentences and some of those paragraphs will become better paragraphs. Writing is a craft that must be learned by work. Hard work.
Why did I not learn this lesson in school? Why did I get through high school and college writing essays which earned good grades? Looking back on them now makes me wince. Why did nobody ever tell me that if I wanted to write well, I needed to spend way more time working on the craft of writing? Where did the myth start that it was possible to whip out a nice essay with no struggle over words and meaning, with no search for the perfect word?
John Steinbeck obviously writes better prose than most mortals. But, as this diary makes perfectly clear, the reason he could do that is because he worked at it, he struggled with it. Day after day.
The trouble with being too casual about a manuscript is that you don’t do it. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, “I’ll do it if I feel like it.” One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not. And I am a little afraid that they are not much good. However down they go. The forced work is sometimes better than the easy, but there is no rule about it. Sometimes they come out better than at other times and that is all one can say.
That is indeed all one can say. If you want to learn to write well, there is no substitute for the discipline of writing. However, there is another barrier, I suspect a rather common barrier. In order to learn to write well, one must first be convinced that writing well is important. Not merely important to get a good grade, but important in and of itself. That was another lesson I never learned in school.
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