Writing Tools

One writing tool commonly cited by teachers and editors is to "murder your darlings." In other words, writers should delete from copy any favorite phrase that, while decorative, contributes little to the focus of the story. The phrase "murder your darlings" is often misattributed to George Orwell but can be traced to the British author and scholar Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Quiller-Couch's wisdom on the craft is captured in a book titled "On the Art of Writing," based on lectures he delivered at Cambridge University in 1913 and 1914. This important book was republished in 2006 in an inexpensive Dover edition. I've read it with a marker in my hand and pass on to you the most interesting or useful bits of business. I've preserved his British spelling:

Style ... is not -- can never be -- extraneous ornament. ... If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it -- whole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

Addressing students:

• amazon.com

  Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we practise writing: that we practise it not only for our own improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognizable hall-mark of anything turned out by our English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.

• The more extensive, therefore, your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention. / Yes, of invention, your power to make something new: and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions.

• Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist? Well, and why not? Is it a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to better citizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought and applying it in the best language at your command?

And, next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have done with it and leave it alone. But I pray you, do not despise it if you meant to practice it, though it be but as a step to something better. For while the ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you go unsustained by belief in what you are trying to do.

• I do not forget that the printed book -- the written word -- presupposes a speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in use of the speaking voice.

• Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon? The first is that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech. ... The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. ... [I]f you would write masculine English, never ... forget the old tag of your Latin Grammar -- masculine will only be things that you can touch and see.

• The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, "They gave him a silver teapot," you write as a man. When you write "He was made the recipient of a silver teapot," you write Jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun.

• Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the particular.

• Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim -- to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague -- as a canon of rhetoric.

• We laid down certain rules to help us in the way of straight Prose:

1) Almost always prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

2) Almost always prefer the direct word to the circumspect.

3) Generally use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive.

• I would urge on you that in every sentence there is just a right point of emphasis which you must train your ears to detect.

Quoting Quintilian:

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader's sense and imprinted on the mind.

And there, friends, you have the best of old Arthur Quiller-Couch. Thanks, Arty.