Thoughts on writing …
If you love reading, write.
If you love writing, read.
And then edit, edit, edit … some of my poems are over 40 years old but I still love editing them and they always end up better (and even if they don’t, I can always edit them again).
To improve my writing style one of my university lecturers recommended Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I still have it and I still use it. There’s a link to a PDF above but the whole book is a great investment.
I’ll write more on writing one day but for now, content yourself with what the wonderful Oscar Wilde thought about the subject. This comes from a lovely piece on the web by Julian De Medeiros. Thank you.
Wilde may not have been a poet, but he believed that fiction was better than truth. As he put it to a female friend: “if truth came to my door, I would say ‘you are too obvious’. And I would throw it out the window.”
As a critic, Oscar Wilde was often comically dismissive. He once said that he rarely read the books he had to review, because “one wouldn’t drink a cask of wine if one didn’t like the glass.” In one review he said that whilst the text was not worth reading, it was still attractive to look at.
Above all, Wilde disliked writing that tried to tell people how to live. He was suspicious of moralizing tracts, and didn’t think that art should have an overt message. As he put it, “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written. That is all.”
And whilst Wilde felt himself to be as good a judge as any when it came to distinguishing good from bad writing, he also believed in art-for-art’s sake. Indeed, he himself wrote and published so much that sometimes he contradicted himself. When his first essay collection appeared he added a note, saying: “I don’t always agree with what I’ve written.”
