murder your darlings
British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch (pen name “Q”) published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916) while serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University. Here he warns of purple prose…
“To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not–can never be–extraneous Ornament … ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it –whole-heartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. ‘Murder your darlings.’
“…’How excellent a thing is sleep,’ sighed Sancho Panza; ‘it wraps a man round like a cloak’–an excellent example…of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that ‘among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.’ How vile a thing…!”
character development
“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”
- Tom Wolfe
death
It’s a shadow at the back of the mind. Just on the verge of being.
A heavy cloud that settles at the base of who and what we are before flying off, upward and onward. Taking our breath away just as sure as it put it there in the first place.
A vague, willowy figure that almost isn’t.
It’s where the whole reaper image comes from.
basics
If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence…Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse. So says Walter Mosley.
A few months ago I was watching John Grisham on one of the network morning shows. He was plugging his new book, talking about his first literary ‘foray’ into politics and saying things like ‘this sort of thing is already happening in West Virginia’ when someone asked if he had any advice for aspiring writers. His reply was as matter of fact as the man himself.
If you want to get published, you have to write a page a day. If you can’t do that, you’ll never write a book.
Now, back to writing. No more of this bumbling Boris blog type stuff. I’d forgotten why I started Plain Simple English in the first place.
boris
The man defined by his hair – who comes from a line of blond Turks – now runs London.
Just watching his dad on television. He’s basically saying his son ‘has been without a drink for over a year..that’s how serious he is about running the capital,’ which I find sort of amusing.
It’s true Boris Johnson makes good copy. Good T.V. In fact – politics aside – I developed a little crush on him during his Have I Got News for You stints.
Apparently, I’m not the only one.
writers write
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
- Ernest Hemingway
jabberwocky
The evening was a strange one. Darcy danced on her two sore feet to an out of tune fiddle played by the neighbor’s cat. Her brother slid across the floor on his belly making hissing noises and laughing out loud. I got scared and started writing a story about Old Lady Filmore and how she was blind. And smelled of turpentine.
