Alexandra Popoff's Blog - Posts Tagged "writers"
Writers: Rating Their Own Books
Upon completing his first great novel, Tolstoy told a friend, “I’ve stopped writing, and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace… I swear I’ll never do it again.” The story repeated itself when, after finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy dismissed it in one sentence: “I assure you that this vile thing no longer exists for me.” While he was celebrated as the greatest living writer, Tolstoy moved on to study religion and to make his own translation of the Gospels. His refusal to take his artistic achievement for granted allowed him to move on and explore life from other angles.
Tolstoy’s scathing remarks about his fiction remind me of Somerset Maugham’s story about Marcel Proust told in the introduction to his novel Of Human Bondage. Proust decided to review his own novel (I presume it was his monumental In Search of Lost Time), thinking he could do it better than a critic. Having written the review, Proust asked a friend, a young writer, to submit it under his own name. The review was turned down: the editor said that Marcel Proust would never forgive him for publishing such an insensitive piece of criticism. Proust must have torn his own book to pieces, without realizing it. Maugham, who called Proust’s novel “the greatest fiction to date,” thought that authors alone know what they fell short of accomplishing: “Their aim is perfection and they are wretchedly aware that they have not attained it.” But if authors cannot be trusted to judge their own work, why listen to their remarks? I think that a sense of openness is essential for any writer or an artist.
Writers of today are silent about their failings. I could give examples of the opposite when, facing pressure to promote their books, some get carried away in praising them. Orlando Figes, the author of prize-winning books on Russian history, was exposed in 2010 on Amazon’s British site assessing his own book as “beautiful and necessary” and rating his competitors’ books as “rubbish” and “pretentious.”
I’m troubled by the fact that the book industry has become so commercialized that authors no longer tell the reader what they actually think about their writing.
While in the days of Tolstoy and Maugham a reader was perceived as a trusted friend, now he is treated like a customer. Writers of the past were frank with their audiences –– and I think about this when reading blurbs on the book covers describing every modern novel as fascinating and every biography as definitive.
Writers of today participate in publishers’ boot camps where they are trained to promote their own books. They learn to listen to readers’ praise and to ignore their mispraise.
I’m not suggesting that someone should be trying to match Tolstoy’s remarks about Anna Karenina, a book he described as “unbearably repulsive.” But I regret that being honest or humble is no longer an option for a writer. In the introduction to Of Human Bondage Maugham wrote apologetically, “This is a very long novel and I am ashamed to make it longer by writing a preface to it.” Today, describing one’s book as less than perfect is a costly mistake, so truth suffers as a result.
Tolstoy’s scathing remarks about his fiction remind me of Somerset Maugham’s story about Marcel Proust told in the introduction to his novel Of Human Bondage. Proust decided to review his own novel (I presume it was his monumental In Search of Lost Time), thinking he could do it better than a critic. Having written the review, Proust asked a friend, a young writer, to submit it under his own name. The review was turned down: the editor said that Marcel Proust would never forgive him for publishing such an insensitive piece of criticism. Proust must have torn his own book to pieces, without realizing it. Maugham, who called Proust’s novel “the greatest fiction to date,” thought that authors alone know what they fell short of accomplishing: “Their aim is perfection and they are wretchedly aware that they have not attained it.” But if authors cannot be trusted to judge their own work, why listen to their remarks? I think that a sense of openness is essential for any writer or an artist.
Writers of today are silent about their failings. I could give examples of the opposite when, facing pressure to promote their books, some get carried away in praising them. Orlando Figes, the author of prize-winning books on Russian history, was exposed in 2010 on Amazon’s British site assessing his own book as “beautiful and necessary” and rating his competitors’ books as “rubbish” and “pretentious.”
I’m troubled by the fact that the book industry has become so commercialized that authors no longer tell the reader what they actually think about their writing.
While in the days of Tolstoy and Maugham a reader was perceived as a trusted friend, now he is treated like a customer. Writers of the past were frank with their audiences –– and I think about this when reading blurbs on the book covers describing every modern novel as fascinating and every biography as definitive.
Writers of today participate in publishers’ boot camps where they are trained to promote their own books. They learn to listen to readers’ praise and to ignore their mispraise.
I’m not suggesting that someone should be trying to match Tolstoy’s remarks about Anna Karenina, a book he described as “unbearably repulsive.” But I regret that being honest or humble is no longer an option for a writer. In the introduction to Of Human Bondage Maugham wrote apologetically, “This is a very long novel and I am ashamed to make it longer by writing a preface to it.” Today, describing one’s book as less than perfect is a costly mistake, so truth suffers as a result.
TOLSTOY’S WRITING ADVICE
Today, authors approach famous writers for a book cover blurb. Few expect honest advice.
But over a century ago, when beginning writers sent their manuscripts to Tolstoy, they wanted his advice and some even asked him to revise their prose. He was generous with his time and frequently helped authors from underprivileged backgrounds. In some cases, their prose would get published because Tolstoy had marked it.
His suggestions to authors were paradoxical: Tolstoy advised them not to write, unless they felt it was absolutely necessary, and never to write with an eye to publication.
In 1887, replying to an obscure writer, Tolstoy suggested: “The main thing is not to be in a hurry to write, not to grudge correcting and revising the same thing 10 or 20 times, not to write a lot and not, for heaven’s sake, to make of writing a means of livelihood or of winning importance in people’s eyes.”
However, most authors approached him precisely because they sought publication and were hoping for praise. Some thought that Tolstoy’s advice would boost their writing skills. This was precisely what Tolstoy warned them against: “God save you from that.” Attaining the skill was secondary to what he called “inner content.”
He did not believe that it was possible to teach one how to become a writer, and was annoyed when authors asked him to share secrets of the trade. In 1895, he replied to an author: “…I won’t answer your questions, or rather interrogation, about writing, because they are all empty questions. The one thing I can say to you is to try as hard as you can not to be a writer, or only to be one when you can no longer help being one.”
As he suggested to another author, “You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace.”
He valued sincerity, but thought this quality extremely rare. His advice to fiction writers was simple, although hard to follow: “…Live the lives of the people described, describe in images their inner feelings, and the characters themselves will do what they must do according to their natures…” A fiction writer “needs two things: firstly, to know thoroughly what should be; and secondly, to believe in what should be…” But, as he complained to a friend, immature writers have one without the other.
Preparation for writing mattered most: according to Tolstoy, one had to sift through 1,000 thoughts before recording a valid one. “Just as in speech the spoken word is silver and the unspoken one gold, so in writing––I would say that the written word is tin, and the unwritten one gold…” Many authors, who approached him, lacked this vital ability to restrain their thoughts and do the necessary work, which precedes writing.
In style Tolstoy valued clarity, and to achieve it, he endlessly revised his own prose. “Don’t spare your labour,” he advised an author in 1890, “write as it comes, at length, and then revise it, and above all shorten it. In the business of writing, gold is only obtained, in my experience, by sifting.”
He wrote nonfiction, he said, to clarify his own thoughts. There were “two kinds of writing.” The first and most demanding, came from the writer’s need achieve “the greatest possible clarity” of expression. Such a writer would work assiduously and reject everything that obscures his idea. But there was also writing driven by ambition and the need to impress. It served “to obscure and confuse the truth for oneself and others.” This second type was prevalent and filled newspapers and magazines. As Tolstoy remarked, “I hate it with all my soul.”
In this blog I relied on R.F. Christian’s translation of "Tolstoy’s Letters."
But over a century ago, when beginning writers sent their manuscripts to Tolstoy, they wanted his advice and some even asked him to revise their prose. He was generous with his time and frequently helped authors from underprivileged backgrounds. In some cases, their prose would get published because Tolstoy had marked it.
His suggestions to authors were paradoxical: Tolstoy advised them not to write, unless they felt it was absolutely necessary, and never to write with an eye to publication.
In 1887, replying to an obscure writer, Tolstoy suggested: “The main thing is not to be in a hurry to write, not to grudge correcting and revising the same thing 10 or 20 times, not to write a lot and not, for heaven’s sake, to make of writing a means of livelihood or of winning importance in people’s eyes.”
However, most authors approached him precisely because they sought publication and were hoping for praise. Some thought that Tolstoy’s advice would boost their writing skills. This was precisely what Tolstoy warned them against: “God save you from that.” Attaining the skill was secondary to what he called “inner content.”
He did not believe that it was possible to teach one how to become a writer, and was annoyed when authors asked him to share secrets of the trade. In 1895, he replied to an author: “…I won’t answer your questions, or rather interrogation, about writing, because they are all empty questions. The one thing I can say to you is to try as hard as you can not to be a writer, or only to be one when you can no longer help being one.”
As he suggested to another author, “You should only write when you feel within you some completely new and important content, clear to you but unintelligible to others, and when the need to express this content gives you no peace.”
He valued sincerity, but thought this quality extremely rare. His advice to fiction writers was simple, although hard to follow: “…Live the lives of the people described, describe in images their inner feelings, and the characters themselves will do what they must do according to their natures…” A fiction writer “needs two things: firstly, to know thoroughly what should be; and secondly, to believe in what should be…” But, as he complained to a friend, immature writers have one without the other.
Preparation for writing mattered most: according to Tolstoy, one had to sift through 1,000 thoughts before recording a valid one. “Just as in speech the spoken word is silver and the unspoken one gold, so in writing––I would say that the written word is tin, and the unwritten one gold…” Many authors, who approached him, lacked this vital ability to restrain their thoughts and do the necessary work, which precedes writing.
In style Tolstoy valued clarity, and to achieve it, he endlessly revised his own prose. “Don’t spare your labour,” he advised an author in 1890, “write as it comes, at length, and then revise it, and above all shorten it. In the business of writing, gold is only obtained, in my experience, by sifting.”
He wrote nonfiction, he said, to clarify his own thoughts. There were “two kinds of writing.” The first and most demanding, came from the writer’s need achieve “the greatest possible clarity” of expression. Such a writer would work assiduously and reject everything that obscures his idea. But there was also writing driven by ambition and the need to impress. It served “to obscure and confuse the truth for oneself and others.” This second type was prevalent and filled newspapers and magazines. As Tolstoy remarked, “I hate it with all my soul.”
In this blog I relied on R.F. Christian’s translation of "Tolstoy’s Letters."
