The enduring tension: Writing as vocation versus writing as labor

“ Your full-bred human being loves a run afield with his understanding. With what images does he not surround himself and store his mind! With what fondness does he con travelers' tales and credit poets' fancies! With what patience does he follow science and pore upon old records, and with what eagerness does he ask the news of the day! No great part of what he learns immediately touches his own life or the course of his own affairs: he is not pursuing a business, but satisfying as he can an insatiable mind. ”

“ They pay very well indeed for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand words for the work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous, or the most popular, if there is a difference between fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, want enough literature to justify the best business talent in devoting itself to belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel, or light essays; business talent can do far better in dry goods, groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like. ”

“ I am now [in November 1999] an information systems consultant, where I keep the main computer projects of firms and their foreign subsdiaries running smoothly. And I write. I have been writing since I was a teenager. Short stories (about 100) , psycho-sociological essays, articles and novels. It is an inner need as well as a very great pleasure.”
As for the aim of the internet, “the important thing is the human value that is added to it. The internet can never be shrewd about a situation, take a risk or replace the intelligence of the heart. ”

“ It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, when we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies. ”

“ The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. The maturity of the mind, however, may perchance consist with a certain dryness. ”

“ Precision in diction is the mark of intellect, but also of patient labor. Stevenson said the man not willing to spend the whole afternoon in search of the right word was unfit for the business of literature. Be unsparing of your time. The silliest boast is of the short time a writer has spent upon his work. Authors’ vanity is peculiarly distasteful, because they are the people 53 from whom one might expect more intelligence.
The force, that is, the interest, of your writing, will depend much on the freshness of your choice of words, and on the freshness of your phrasing. ”

“ The pay is not derived by the several 'artists' from their respective 'arts.' But the truth is, that while the 'art' of medicine gives health, and the 'art' of the builder builds a house, another 'art' attends them which is the 'art' of pay. ”

“ It was stated many times that writing and the settlement of human beings are related. So are writing and the exchange of goods, as well as what will become known as labor division. While the use of verbal language makes possible the differentiation of human praxis, the use of written language requires the division between physical and non-physical work. Writing requires skills, such as those needed for using a stylus to engrave in wax or clay, quill on parchment, later the art of calligraphy. It implies knowledge of language and of its rules of grammar and spelling. ”

“ Man is born to make. His business is to construct: to plan: to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing.
That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end (and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other) is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral: and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed.
The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. ”

“ It is a genial image, of men we love--an image of men warm and true of heart, direct and unhesitating in courage, generous, magnanimous, faithful, steadfast, capable of a deep devotion and self-forgetfulness. But the age changes, and with it must change our ideals of human quality. Not that we would give up what we have loved: we would add what a new life demands. In a new age men must acquire a new capacity, must be men upon a new scale, and with added qualities. ”

“ Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmatic framework or radical change, when the scale of human life and work required different means to meet efficiency expectations. Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development of writing, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, the Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy are the six changes in the scale of humankind, each with its corresponding pragmatic framework. ”

“ It appears that once human activity moves from the predominantly object level to the meta condition (one of self-awareness and self-interpretation) , we have several languages and several contingent literacies instead of a dominant language and dominant literacy. When writing is replaced by multimedia along the communication channels of the networked world, we seem to enjoy rediscovering ourselves as much richer entities than we knew or were told about through literate mediation. ”

“ Technology takes care of spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as embodied in our practice with interface language-the language mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction, become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape, to be listened to while driving to work. ”

“ The current craze is for psychoanalytic novels, which are not half so psychoanalytic as the books of Jane Austen, as posterity will find out for itself. . . . Art in this epoch is too self-conscious. Everybody is striving to do something new, instead of writing or painting or composing what is natural. ”

“ Of all human employments, writing is the farthest removed from any touch of Nature. It is at most a symbolism twice dead and buried. The poetry in it lies back of a double hypothesis. Supposing the original sounds to have once been imitations of the voices of Nature, those sounds have now run completely away from what they once represented; and supposing that letters were once imitations of natural signs, they have long since lost the resemblance, and have become independent entities. Whatever else is done by human artifice has in it some relic of Nature, some touch of life. ”

“ But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. ”

“ And while there is but one Lamb, there are many letters which have in them something of this same personal quality, something of this restful charm. The supply can never be exhausted, because letter-writings—not light articles now, nor brilliant semi-historic narratives, but real letter-writing—is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another. The craving for sympathy; the natural and healthy egotism which prompts us to open our minds to absent friends; the desire we all feel to make known to others that which is happening to ourselves ”

“ Do not become absorbed in yourself. Your interests cover only the half of any piece of writing; the other man’s less visible half is necessary to complete yours. And if I have here discussed writing more than speech, that is merely because when we speak we utter our first thoughts, but when we write, our second,—or better still, our fourth; and in the greater deliberation which writing affords I have felt that the demands of morality and art, which are universally imbedded in language, could be more distinctly perceived. ”

“ A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resource availability shows that with language, writing and reading, and finally with literacy, and even more through engineering outside language experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic human action was put in place, and used to compensate for the progressive imbalance between population growth and resources.
Our time is in more than one way the expression of a semiosis with deep roots in the pragmatic context in which writing emerged. Engineering dominates today. ”

“ Try the Australian weekly papers, if you have any gift of expression, till one of them takes you up. After that the path is more easy. Perseverance and practice will ordinarily discover the method which leads to success.
A natural turn for writing is necessary, perhaps indispensable. Practice does much, but the novelist, like the poet, is chiefly 'born, not made.' Even in the case of hunters and steeplechasers, the expression 'a natural jumper' is common among trainers. ”

“ Actresses will pay you likewise for praise, but the wiser among them pay for criticism. To be passed over in silence is what they dread the most; and the very best thing of all, from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it costs more in consequence. ”

“ You see, it took our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. ”

“ And the increased oral and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The transition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift from the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and their environment. It takes place in the context of the evolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition from literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from analytic to synthetic. ”

“ We now come to the mental phenomena, of which the following are the chief:
1. Automatic Writing.—The medium writes involuntarily; often matter which he is not thinking about, does not expect, and does not like. Occasionally definite and correct information is given of facts of which the medium has not, nor ever had, any knowledge. Sometimes future events are accurately predicted. The writing takes place either by the hand or 48through a planchette. Often the handwriting changes. Sometimes it is written backwards; sometimes in languages the medium does not understand. ”