Literary Success

Literary Success 

The desire, the felt need, to talk is surely the need to be heard; and the desire to write is surely the desire to be read.

We seldom talk to ourselves, aloud, and appear odd when we do. (The unceasing chatter of internal monologue is something different.) Yet we write page after page of unread prose, sustained (I suppose) by the thought that those pages may be read by someone, sometime. 

I am reading Virginia Woolf's "Diary", volume three, 1925-1930. It is clear that she minds extremely whether or not her work is being read; and will be read by posterity. Then, following the admiring reception in 1925 of "Mrs. Dalloway" by certain critics, she relaxes. She then claims, with T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster, that it is the writing alone that matters; the capturing of a thought; the moulding of a sentence. 

I propose the thesis that we do, absolutely, need to be read, by at least some people, the discerning few; perhaps only by family, perhaps only by one person. But, once we are granted that minimal audience, we can then concentrate on, and relish, the power and the beauty of our prose. 

It rankles, somewhat, that for some people the words flow from their pens straight into the best-seller list. Are those best-selling novices blest with a natural felicity, or the accident of a good plot; or are they perhaps great mimics, following a formula? For others, there are years of apprenticeship. For Virgina Woolf, for example, there were ten years and three unread novels before her two masterpieces. 

It must matter what we write as well as how we write it, but right now I am worrying about writing style and will wonder on another day about hooking the interest of the reader. 

How can we improve our writing style? Can we self-improve? Can we read our own prose with a sufficiently critical eye to see where we are being boring, or ambiguous, or trite, or illogical, or wrong. One problem is that we know already what we mean to write, and may not even read our own text accurately. A further and more insidious problem is the narcissus-trap, of so liking the thoughts we believe we are successfully expressing, that we accept our own work too readily.

It would be a great help if we could obtain outside help, offered so sensitively as to be emotionally acceptable; perhaps doing no more than encouraging us (as writers) to criticise ourselves; perhaps using bland key-words to flag, not actual objections, but categories of problems; like logic, rhythm, spelling, clichés;  so bland as to be unarguable.

This would not guarantee that our prose becomes compelling, accessible, or even readable; but it would surely guarantee that it improve.

Virginia Woolf, in her "Diary", often asks herself what she is doing in that exercise, in her case; perhaps honing her skill, capturing observations to feed into future novels, and recording conversations. In 1926, after 10 years of sporadic but persistent diary-keeping, she even raises the possibility that her diaries might eventually be published. I find them (and Anne Bell's foot-notes) fascinating, and read steadily on, two pages at a stretch. 

My own blogging started as an attempt to understand a topic (banking, debt, Ash die-back, COVID, the origin of morals, international law, etc).  As a result my blog lacks focus. It is unlikely that any single reader will find adjacent posts interesting. Yet, I think they are being read, a  little. (And not just by robots, though those undoubtedly dominate. Perhaps 1% of the 140,000 visits recorded by the blog are real people; perhaps 0.1%.).

(Comments direct to cawstein@gmail.com are welcomed.)