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Though there is a vast difference between being a journalist and a writer, the two sometimes combine, and both suffer the same terrible disease. The affliction has been described as the "insatiate itch to scribble".
My own suffering led me momentarily to compassion for others who bear this compulsive disorder. Fortunately for all concerned, I learned after visiting only two clinics, to say 'no' to invitations to address the inmates.
This is what I told the first group I encountered:
If you don't have the itch, stay away from writing.
I assume that most of you here are within this Writers Circle because you are - like me - a sufferer and fellow patient. So all I can do is offer sympathy, and try and give you some comfort, and some advice.
It is not my advice - good advice, as Oscar Wilde once advised, is of no use to anyone except for passing on. So I'm simply passing on what I've heard and read. However, I also have a modicum of experience in writing and publishing because I happen to have met dozens of well-known authors, publishers and their agents. Worse, I discovered to my horror last night that I have seen in print more than half a million of my own words. Half a million in a year, that is, for more than 50 years.
That's at least 25 million words, committed to print - a shameful number. A sin, really. My excuse is that most of them were in features, articles, reports, columns, editorials and so on for newspapers and magazines so that very few still exist to clutter up bookshelves.
Yet from all those words, I must have learned something, surely? If you wish to ask me any questions on the subject of how to get published, we may see if there is anything I've learned that can help you.
But first let me offer you the advice which I have been collecting - and ignoring - for years
Getting rich from writing
First of all, you need to ask yourself two questions:
Do you want to create something memorable?
Or do you merely wish to be rich and famous?
Journalist-writer H L Mencken said 50 years ago that the impulse to create beauty is rather rare in writers.. Far ahead comes the yearning to make money. And after that, he said, comes the yearning to make a noise.
He's correct, in a way. Most writers I've heard of cannot write unless they desperately need money - or are forced to write for a publisher's deadline. Think of Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Hemingway. They had the itch, but their works exist because of the driving force of their monetary need.
Hilaire Belloc believed that a writer's life has always been a bitter business, and that money and literature - I emphasise literature, as opposed to novelish scribbling - fail to mix. "Poverty and contempt comes to those who write well - Fatuity and wealth for those who write ill," he opined.
Some who write very well indeed often complain that they earn less from books than it costs them in the obligatory giving away of copies.
T S Eliot, one of the best and more famous of the moderns, discovered that if you really want to write, you must also earn a living in some other profession.. .
Which reminds me of Dame Edith Sitwell who in the shadow of the Victorian era, shocked her parents by telling them that she was leaving home to become a writer. "Do you prefer writing to human love?" they asked her.
"As a profession, yes," said young Edith.
So much for money. What about fame?
Achieving fame through your pen or P.C.
Fame is extraordinarily transitory for writers. And, in any case, Virginia Woolf once defined average authors as: trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. One needs to remember that when one's first book hits the shelves. Indeed, think about it every time you write. It won't stop the itch, but it helps.
How DO you get a book published?
Here is some of the advice I have garnered:
1. If it is riches you want, then you should start writing for people who move their lips when they're reading alone.
2. Don't think for a moment that there is automatically a book in everyone, as conventional literary wisdom suggests.. I am busy at this moment compiling an anthology of South African writing, and one of the contributors, TV critic Darell Bristow-Bovey tells me that, after being tutored by both J M Coetzee and Andre Brink, he became a publishers' editor. After reading hundreds of manuscripts from budding novelists he says he discovered that - far from there being a book in everyone, some people don't even have a note to the milkman in them.
As that does not apply to any of us here, let's look at some advice on
The technique of writing.
Personally, I believe that no-one can be taught to write a gripping novel or great prose. If you feel the itch, or if you can tell a story - then you must simply sit down and start writing. Many publishers and their agents insist on outlines, story-lines, plot charts and other advance planning.. But I'm with E M Forster who once protested: How can I know what I think until I see what I've written?
Only then comes the hard part of writing. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that he re-wrote every sentence of his books at least seven times.
Some-one else - I forget who - said that in composing, as a general rule, you should run your pen through every other word you have written. "You have no idea what vigour it will give your style," she said.
She was anticipated nearly four centuries ago by Nicholas Boileau - who boasted that he struck out three of every four words he wrote. But perhaps he needed to.
Remember, instead, that if you do not discipline your writing; if you do not edit it repeatedly yourself - some ruthless swine is going to do it for you. He or she will murder your immortal prose. . . presuming there is any interest in it whatever.
Finally some advice down the years on how to deal with another dreaded disease: Writers Block.
Some of the best succumb to it, including Moliere, who said that he always wrote a good first line. His problem was to write all the rest
Hemingway used to sharpen 20 pencils before he sat down to write. Most of us find a hundred other tasks to do to keep us from our computer's blank screen. A journalist I know, who is now a bestselling South African author, never had any problem churning out reports or articles. But she had to be constantly encouraged to write novels, and she resorted to Yoga to acquire the appropriate mood, and would go through several rituals every day, including donning the same clothing to whenever she finally sat down to write.
The best technique I ever heard of was that of Jeffrey Archer who said that he used to open a bottle of wine when he sat down to write, and finish the day's stint when the bottle was empty.
I think I've said enough to convince you that the world's advice about how to write is full of CONTRADICTIONS & NONSENSE
It's the itch that matters.
But if you insist on advice, a list of curent books on the subject follows. |
