I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (27 page)

W
riters are commonly called
wordsmiths
, but it might be more accurate to call them
ideasmiths
, for they live in a world of
ideas
as much as of
words
. In 1890, French writer Paul Bourget expressed the importance of ideas in an analogy:

 

Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.

 

For many creative people, ideas are like a flash flood, arriving without advance warning and carrying everything along with it. It can be a frenzied process, and there is always the danger that the torrent will engulf a writer, who is trying to put the key elements of the idea into words before it exits the mind. This may have been what F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he once wrote in a letter to his daughter:

 

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

 

At one time or another, all writers have tried to describe the process of transforming ideas into words on a page. But nobody has ever captured the drama better than Honoré de Balzac:

 

Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army
to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.
Memories charge in, bright flags on high;
the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop;
the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges;
flashes of wit pop up like sharpshooters;
forms and shapes and characters rear up;
the paper is spread with ink.

 

Many writers subscribe to the theory that ideas come with the charge of an explosive. In an 1857 letter to a friend, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

 

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors,
with a flash and an explosion,
and perhaps somebody's castle-roof perforated.

 

And in his 1902 classic,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, William James wrote:

 

An idea, to be suggestive, must come
to the individual with the force of revelation.

 

While some ideas arrive with the power of a thunderbolt, others announce themselves in a soft whisper, barely able to be heard. Still others resemble a seed that must be nurtured before it germinates. This more subtle and tender process was described by Ernest Hemingway in a 1929 conversation with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald:

 

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame,
as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go.
Then it explodes and that is my idea.

 

In yet another variation, ideas sometimes multiply rapidly:

 

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.

JOHN STEINBECK

And sometimes they need to be coaxed before they give up their secrets:

 

An idea, like a ghost…must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

CHARLES DICKENS

While some writers struggle with the problem of too many ideas, others despair over having too few. In a 1752 letter to a friend, Horace Walpole put it this way:

 

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

 

Every writer has experienced a literary drought—most commonly called
a writer's block
—and almost all have tried to describe it. But few descriptions of the phenomenon can rival a passage that appears on the very first page of William Styron's 1979 novel,
Sophie's Choice
. The words come from Stingo, the protagonist, who has recently lost his job as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. It is 1947, and Stingo, two years out of the military, has moved from Virginia to New York to pursue a writing career. Now, living in a Brooklyn rooming house, he is out of work, almost out of money, and in the middle of serious dry spell—a condition he describes masterfully:

 

At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer,
I found that the creative heat which at eighteen
had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame
had flickered out to a dim pilot light
registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided.
It was not that I no longer wanted to write,
I still yearned passionately to produce the novel
which had been for so long captive in my brain.
It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs,
I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein's
remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—
I had the syrup but it wouldn't pour.

 

When you are trying to generate ideas with traction for a mind that has been spinning its wheels, there are few better methods than walking away from your writing table, picking up a book from a favorite author, reading for a while, and then reflecting on what you've read. It's like priming a pump. You pour a little water in, begin pumping on the handle like mad, and the water often starts gushing out. Of course, by reading the works of other writers, you always run the risk of inadvertently pilfering a phrase or two, but it's probably a risk worth taking. And if you're ever accused of leaning on others for your ideas, my recommendation is to plead guilty. It might be called the Thornton Wilder Defense after his remark:

 

I do borrow from other writers, shamelessly! I can only say in my defense,
like the woman brought before the judge on a charge of kleptomania,
“I do steal, but, your Honor, only from the very best stores.”

 

Another remedy for those who are having trouble writing is to begin talking. There's something about
thinking out loud
—whether done to a friend,
aloud to oneself, or into a tape recorder—that gets the juices flowing again. Robert Frost said it this way:

 

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house.
Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.

 

No matter how ideas come—by flash, incubation, larceny, or pressure release—they must be turned into words before they can be turned into literature. This is where the actual task of writing begins. And as long as there have been writers, there have been people advising them how to do it. The first great writing advice book was
The Elements of Style
, a 1918 guide by William Strunk, Jr., a professor of English at Cornell University. Strunk, who believed that writers used too many words to express their ideas, advocated an economy of style. “Omit needless words,” he advised. “Vigorous writing is concise.” And then he wrote:

 

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,
a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines
and a machine no unnecessary parts.
This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short,
or that he avoid all detail…but that every word tell.

 

In 1959, E. B. White of
The New Yorker
magazine—and a student of Professor Strunk's forty years earlier—came out with a revised and updated edition of
The Elements of Style
. The writing world, hungry for a new style guide, gobbled up over ten million copies of
Strunk & White
—as it was called—over the next forty years. In the new edition, White continued the tradition of phrasing prescriptive writing advice in dramatic metaphorical ways:

 

Avoid the use of qualifiers.
Rather, very, little, pretty—
these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.

 

Strunk and White were not the first people in history to use fanciful metaphorical imagery while providing writing advice. The nineteenth-century English poet Robert Southey was a critic of elaborate writing and the champion of a lean, vigorous style. He wrote:

 

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—
the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

 

While there are wide differences of opinion as to the role of ideas in writing—or even what constitutes good writing—a definite consensus has emerged among writers when it comes to critics and reviewers. In his 1930 book
On Literature
, Maxim Gorky provides an extraordinary passage from Anton Chekhov, who begins with a simple but spectacular simile:

 

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil.

 

But then Chekhov takes off on an unexpected, but equally spectacular, flight of fancy. It's a bit lengthy, but I think you'll enjoy the full passage:

 

The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings,
and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging.
The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail.
What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn't know itself.
It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt—
“I'm alive, too, you know!” it seems to say.
“Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about!”
I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and
can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice.
The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky,
who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn't take such a harsh view of critics,
once even calling them “sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.” But he didn't view them all favorably:

 

Some critics are like chimneysweepers;
they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from the nests above;
they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot,
and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders,
and then sing out from the top of the house, as if they had built it.

 

At the end of this chapter, I will provide a compilation titled “Writers on Critics & Reviewers: A Metaphorical Potpourri.” In that section you will find a few dozen additional things writers have said about critics—all negative, and all metaphorical.

Before we get to that, though, let's begin this final chapter of the book by featuring more analogies, metaphors, and similes about the literary life.

 

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue.
You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others, and finally for money.

MARCEL ACHARD

Achard was a French writer whose play
The Idiot
was made into the Hollywood film
A Shot in the Dark
(with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau). A similar observation has been attributed to Moliére: “Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

 

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

JEAN ANOUILH

It is easy to write a check if you have enough money in the bank,
and writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

SHOLEM ASCH

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Asimov was one of history's most prolific authors, with over five hundred books to his credit. He once wrote, “I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die.”

 

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned
than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

BERNARD BARUCH

Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes.

SYLVIA BEACH

Just as there is nothing between
the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

HILAIRE BELLOC

That is, with omelettes and autobiographies, either they're great, or they stink.

 

With a novelist, like a surgeon,
you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands—
someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

SAUL BELLOW

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks;
and writing, the wings by which it flies.

MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON

I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower,
for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

JOHN BURROUGHS

In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same metaphor to make a slightly different point: “Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.”

 

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

EDMUND BURKE

Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.

ROY CAMPBELL

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

ALBERT CAMUS

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade,
just as painting does, or music.
If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them.
Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

The American writer B. J. (Beatrice Joy) Chute, who taught creative writing at Barnard College for many years, wrote similarly: “Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.”