On Learning To Write (Without All the Usual BS)

I have experienced far, far too many writing courses. When I was homeschooled for a while in high-school, I read dozens of books on How to Write — How to Write Essays, How to Write Stories, How to Write Poetry. I read Zinsser’s book on non-fiction, Gardner’s book on fiction, and Williams’s book on style. I read anthologies of the remarks of famous writers on the writing process. I read advice from Samuel Johnson, Cicero, Edgar Allen Poe, and John Updike. I even read textbooks like Watts’s American Rhetoric. And of course I read that book by Strunk and White which has had such a ridiculously hegemonic influence.

You see, I wanted to be a writer.

I could have spent my time better. Robert Louis Stevenson, in an essay called “A College Magazine,” offered advice that would have gotten me out of the How to Write books and sent me much farther on the way to rhetorical mastery. Here’s his advice:

Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.  .  .  . That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality.  .  .  . Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.

Once I really got hold of this practice — playing the “sedulous ape” — everything changed. While hardly approximating the general with his legions of words that Stevenson describes in the last sentence above, I am at least fluent enough to make myself understood and I am aware of how much higher I have yet to aim in my own writing.

But I keep having to learn this lesson over again. Inevitably, after I left highschool and came to college, I was forced to attempt new kinds of writing. It may surprise you to hear it if you’ve never considered it — but the historical essay is an entirely different form than the essay of literary criticism, the personal narrative than the book summary, the scholarship essay than the rigorous philosophical argumentation paper. What books (and teachers) on How to Write insist is that there are formulae that they have abstracted, forms of organization, necessary elements of style. But frankly these formulae a dead ends most of the time. The ancient study of rhetoric got it right — rhetoric is for the most part the analysis of texts, improvement of one’s own literary abilities depend more on imitation. In other words, the formal study of rhetoric (as, say, Augustine practiced it) was a magnifying glass on imitation, allowing the student to imitate details he would otherwise have overlooked. Alas, I haven’t encountered genuine rhetorical analysis even in literature classes… But what I have discovered is that each new step in my education has required new forms of writing; therefore, new models and new bouts of imitation. For example, just last semester it dawned on me that I needed to actually learn to write decent historical papers (or historical portions of papers), so I found myself some models and wrote the next few papers in close imitation (not of content, but of form). Just this last week I rediscovered this trick with the novel I am writing this semester.

Resolution: to immediately find models and learn by imitation when I encounter a new form of discourse, rather than waiting until my own inadequacy reminds me of the technique.