Flora Klickmann

“ Most of us break out into verse at one period of our life. Youth starting out to explore a world that seems teeming with new discoveries, generally tries to voice his emotions in poetry—not because youth has any special aptitude for this form of literature, but because the poet has expressed, as no other writer has done, the hopes and ideals, the craving for romance and the thirst for beauty, that are among the characteristics of our golden years. And youth, wishing to voice his own emotions, naturally selects the literary form in which such emotions have already been enshrined. ”

“ But remember this: the really well-informed man does not use his learning for show purposes. Knowledge should not be employed for superficial ornamentation. It must be so woven into the strands of our everyday life, that it becomes as much a part of us as the food we eat and the air we breathe. Our reading should not be made to advertise our intellectual standing.
We do not read Plato and Shakespeare and Dante that we may be able to quote them, and thus let others know we are familiar with them. ”

“ Life is too short (and the publisher too chary of his paper and printing bill) to allow any of us, save the truly famous, to describe minutely the whole background of our writing, spiritual, mental, or material. If we can, by a few expressive words, or phrases, create an atmosphere that shall reproduce in the reader's mind the train of thought, or the scene, that was in our own mind as we wrote, we shall, obviously, be spared the making of many sentences, and the covering of much paper with descriptive matter and soul analyses, that might otherwise overweight our main theme. ”

“ If you were writing a story, the cause of her irritability might be an important link in the chain of events. And in scores of other directions, the cause of an action might be infinitely more important in the working out of your plot than the action itself.
Moreover, if you want your work to appeal to a wide and varied audience, you must take as your main theme something that is understood by all conditions of people; something that makes a universal appeal. That is why the greatest writers make the human heart the pivot of their stories, as a rule. ”

“ There is a very special and distinct charm about literature that is musical to the ear—words that are euphonious, phrases that are rhythmic, sentences that rise and fall with definite cadence.
Unfortunately, the twentieth century, so far, has been primarily concerned with the making of noise rather than music. Even before the War, we lived in a welter of hideous jarring sound, to which every single department of life has added its quota. Outdoors the vehicles honk and rattle and roar; in business life the clack and whirr of machinery drowns all else ”

“ We read them in order to get a wider outlook on life; to see things from more than one point of view; to look into minds that are bigger than our own; to learn great facts and problems of life that might not otherwise come our way, yet are necessary for us to know, if we are to see human nature in right perspective. In short, we study great authors in order to arrive at a better understanding of our neighbour; some take us farther than this, and help us to a better understanding of God and His Universe. If we are reading the classics with any lesser aim, we are missing a great deal. ”

“ The Egoist tells you at once what to expect. But whether the motif of a book be obvious or not at first apparent, it is important so far as the staying quality of a story is concerned. And it is not until you have studied standard authors, with this particular matter in mind, that you realise how much more important it is that a book should have a keynote, than that the hero should be handsome, or that the heroine should be dressed in some soft clinging material that suits her surpassing loveliness to perfection. ”

“ Not only must a poem contain a definite idea, it must be a poetic idea, something that will lift the reader above the prose of life. Try to make him see beauty if you can; and to hear beauty in the music of your words. Poetry should be beautiful and suggest loveliness, whenever possible.
However simple and ordinary the subject of your verse, try to carry the reader beyond superficialities, to the wonderful and the unordinary that so often give glory to life's commonplaces. ”

“ Bearing all this in mind, it is easy to understand why so much of our modern literature became tainted with the same sound-harshness that had smitten life as a whole. Some writers would not take the trouble to be musical; some maintained that there was no necessity to be melodious; some regarded beauty of sound as synonymous with weakness; others—and these were in the majority—had lost all sense of word-music and the captivating quality of rhythm. ”

“ It is useless to write a scientific treatise in such a dull way that the student is not sufficiently attracted to read the second chapter; it is useless to write a religious article in such a stereotyped, conventional manner that nobody gets beyond the second paragraph, and everybody is quite willing to take the rest as read; it is useless to write such vague insipid verse that the reader does not even take the trouble to find out what it is all about; and it is useless to write feeble fiction that lands the reader nowhere in particular, at the end of several chapters. ”

“ In addition to writing verse, I urge all students who wish to cultivate a sense of music in their writing to read good poetry, and, whenever possible, to read it aloud.
When reading aloud, the ear helps as well as the eye; whereas, when reading silently, the eye is apt to run on faster than the ear is able—mentally—to take in the sounds; and you are bound to miss some of the finer shades of movement and melody. When you say the words aloud, the sound and the beat of the syllables are more likely to be impressed upon your mind. ”

“ We are all of us like this when we start. But as we gain experience—not merely experience in writing, but that wide experience of the world and human nature, which is such a valuable asset to the writer—we come to realise that the public pay very little heed to a writer personally (until he or she becomes over-poweringly famous) ; it is the subject-matter of a book that they trouble about, and the way that subject-matter is treated. Readers do not care in the least if an author can read Hafiz in the original (unless he is actually writing about Persian poetry, of course) ”

“ All the master-minds seem to agree that a story, whether long or short, should consist of three main parts. Indeed most of the art-products of the brain are constructed on a three-part basis. Experience has shown that this form is the most satisfying to the mind—and remember, one of the essentials of a work of art is that it shall satisfy the mind with that sense of fitness and completeness and appropriateness, so very hard to define exactly in words, and yet so necessary to our enjoyment of anything. ”

“ Nearly-genius is almost as rare. The only quality that presents itself in abundance is entirely untrained mediocrity.
It may be thought that this applies equally to all departments of the world's work; but it is not so. While genius is scarce wherever one looks, I know of only one other vocation where the candidates expect good pay at the very start without any sort of training, any experience, any specialised knowledge, or any idea of the simplest requirement of the business from which they hope to draw an income—the other vocation being domestic service. ”

“ In writing, as in so many other things, it is the final impression that counts. The reader's attitude of mind, when he comes to the end of the last page, is a powerful factor in settling your success as a writer. If you end lamely, with non-effective sentences, or with pointless indecision—if, in short, the reader does not feel he has got somewhere or achieved something by reading the article, he will not be remarkably keen on anything else you may write.
The beginner seldom pauses to inquire: What is my object in writing this article? ”

“ Amateurs often think it is much easier to write a "fragment" than to write a complete anything. The one who hesitates as to whether he has the ability to write a long story, is quite sure he is capable of writing a fragmentary bit of fiction—one of those vague scraps with neither beginning nor ending that are always tumbling into the editor's letter-box—and he feels that all vagueness, and lack of finish, and the fact that the MS. gets nowhere, are sanctioned because he adds, as a sub-title some such qualification as "An Episode," or "A Character Study," or "A Glimpse." ”

“ It is the way one handles the commonplace that reveals the true artist; and style plays an important part in this, though it is by no means everything!
The question of imaginative work is big enough to deserve a volume to itself: much has already been written on the subject, and much remains to be said—too much to make it possible to do it justice in a book of this description. But I mention it here, in passing, to warn the beginner against spending much time on work that is not imaginative but merely impossible, until thoroughly grounded in the rudiments of his craft. ”

“ Certainly, the scenery and "local colour" and inanimate surroundings may influence you favourably or otherwise—backgrounds and the general "setting" of a story are valuable, more valuable than the amateur realises; nevertheless, they are not the main features, and should never be made the main features in fiction.
Once you grasp the importance of the "spiritual values," in life itself no less than in writing, you will understand why it is that some books survive centuries of change and social upheaval, and appeal to all sorts and conditions of temperaments. ”

“ Few people can concentrate on reading even the day's news—it has to be given in pictures. The picture-palace and the music-hall revue (which is another form of spectacular entertainment) stand for the mental stimulus that is the utmost a large bulk of the population are equal to to-day.
We delude ourselves by saying that we live in such a busy age, we have not time to read. But it is not our lack of time so much as our lack of brain power that is the trouble; and that brain power has been dissipated, primarily, by over-indulgence in desultory reading that was valueless. ”

“ When the young wife who married in her teens visits her old home in company with her one-year-old infant, it is invariably the dearest old lady who comes forward to embrace her first grandchild; and from her own conversation and the description of her general appearance, the sweet old soul must be at least eighty, despite all that Nature might rule to the contrary, to say nothing of the dressmaker!
Tradition has it that grandmothers must have white hair, and spectacles, voluminous skirts, and knitting in their hands as they sit in an easy-chair with comfortably slippered feet on a hassock ”

“ You have had to compress your ideas within a set limit; this in itself is a check on the long-winded wandering tendencies of the amateur. You have had to consider the respective weight of syllables—which is worth an accent, and which is not, and so on. In short, you have had to give some discriminating thought to what you were writing, and how you were writing it, and that is what the beginner so seldom does. He more often sits down and goes on and on and on—words, words, words—with no feeling for their respective values, or the proportion of the sentences and incidents as a whole. ”

“ The large majority of people are so self-conscious when they take pen in hand to write a story or an article, that they cannot be natural. They do not realise that they should write as ordinary human beings; they invariably feel they should write as famous authors; and they promptly drop the language they use as ordinary human beings in every-day life, and adopt an artificial, stilted style which they seem to think the correct thing for an author. ”

“ Study the Editorials as you would study a book, since the writings of first-class journalists are excellent models for the amateur, a fact that is curiously overlooked by the student. Read a fixed amount each day, instead of relying on a haphazard picking up of a paper and a careless glance over its contents. Then, as a useful exercise, take the subject-matter of a paragraph, or an article, and see how you would have treated it; try if you can improve on it (after all, most things in this world can be improved upon if the right person does the improving) . ”

“ One advantage of local colour is the opportunity it gives the writer of a double hold on the reader's interest—he may captivate by the setting of his theme no less than by the theme itself. Also it enables him more effectually to take the reader "out of himself," and place him in a new environment—an essential point if that reader is to become absorbed in what he is reading.
Mere verbatim description of scenery is not the best way to work in local colour; it is liable to become guide-booky. Neither is a catalogue of the beauty spots of a locality any better. ”

“ Now why is it that the girl who starts out to write fiction loves to introduce her heroine in this wise? It is most unlikely that the amateur knows much about a boudoir—few of us do. It is a room that appertains solely to the rich, and to only a small proportion of the rich at that. I know many wealthy women and many well-born women who haven't a boudoir, simply because the cramped conditions of modern living seldom leave them a room to spare for this purpose. ”

“ When Strauss put together his sound monstrosities, which he misnamed music, he was only echoing the general noise-chaos that had taken possession of the universe, permeating art and [Pg 69] literature no less than everyday life. The nightmares of the cubists and futurists were merely undisciplined blatancy and harshness rendered in colour instead of in sound, and were further demonstrations of the crudity to which a nation is bound to revert when it wilfully discards the finer things of the soul in a mad pursuit of money. ”