The Craftsmanship Of Writing

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Preface

The present volume is the outgrowth of a course in essay writing, offered two years ago in connection with the University Extension work of Columbia University. It embodies in part what the author then undertook to teach his students, supplemented by what the students quite unconsciously taught the author. There was a class which, taken collectively, offered much diversity of scholarship, a wide range of preparation for writing. Yet one and all of them presented practically the same sort of problem; one and all said in effect: "I have had such and such training; I have worked hard and willingly; yet my manuscripts do not sell. What is the matter with my preparation? What books should I read? What course should I take?" And in a wider way, these are the questions that are to-day being asked throughout the length and breadth of this continent. Now the purpose of this volume is to answer these questions, by pointing out that the fault is primarily with the would-be authors themselves, and not with their preparation. The best teaching they can anywhere receive is at most a makeshift, a mere starting point; they must learn to rely upon themselves, and the earlier the better. The most that this book or any other can do is to guide them away from certain wrong paths and toward certain right ones; they must cultivate self-criticism, industry, the art of taking infinite pains, the habit of looking upon to-day's failures as the stepping stones toward to-morrow's success. The laurels of authorship are worth the winning largely because there is no primrose path leading to them.

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CONTENTS :


I. The Inborn Talent
II. The Power of Self-criticism
III. The Author's Purpose
IV. The Technique of Form
V. The Gospel of Infinite Pains
VI. The Question of Clearness
VII. The Question of Style
VIII. The Technique of Translating

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An excerpt from:

CHAPTER I

THE INBORN TALENT


It is always helpful, in writings possessing even the mildest of text-book flavour, for author and reader to start with a clear mutual understanding of scope and purpose. The best way in which to forestall that aggrieved sense which a student often feels of having derived no profit from a certain book or article or lecture course, is to say frankly, at the outset: "Here, in brief, is what we intend to do. If your individual case falls outside these limits, you will waste your time, since it belongs upon the list of what we have no intention of doing."

In the present volume of papers on The Craftsmanship of Writing, the best and quickest way to reach this helpful understanding is to explain what first suggested them, and what results it is hoped that they will achieve. There has probably never been a time when so large a number of men and women, of all sorts and conditions, have yielded to the lure of authorship — and the elemental, naive and random questions that they often ask shows that there has never been a time when so many were in need of a word of friendly guidance. And this is precisely what the present volume claims to give. It does not pretend to point a royal road to literature — to furnish a new philosopher's stone for transmuting ordinary citizens into famous poets and novelists. It has no ambition to create new authors — since authors worthy of the name are born, not made nor to compete with the efforts of our college English Departments, our summer lecture courses, our correspondence schools and literary agencies — for we have a surfeit of these already. The aim of The Craftsmanship of Writing is nothing more pretentious than to help would-be writers to reach a somewhat saner, more logical understanding of the real nature of the profession they are entering upon, both on its technical and its artistic side; to discount its delays and disappointments; and above all, to learn to help themselves by intelligent self-criticism. For it is a somewhat curious fact that there is no other line of intellectual work in which a man or a woman may remain, through months and years, so fundamentally ignorant of his or her real worth.

Now the reason why a struggling author may waste years of misdirected effort, without knowing just how good or bad his productions really are, is not difficult to explain. The sources of any workman's knowledge of his worth are practically only three in number: the market value of his ware; his own self-criticism, and the opinions of others. Now it is a common experience among young authors to find through weary months that their wares apparently have no market value at all — this does away with the first source of knowledge....