Easy peasy? by Eve Lockett

Whenever I browse in second-hand bookshops, I look out for books and essays by authors explaining how they write, and their advice for those who wish to write. Some are available for free or a few pennies as ebooks, such as The Art of Fictionby Virginia Woolf, An Autobiographyby Anthony Trollope, or Essays in the Art of Writingby Robert Louis Stevenson.

Wilkie Collins, in a letter to one of his readers describing how he wrote The Woman in White, reveals the effort involved.

You are kind enough to allude, in terms of approval, to my method of writing English, and to ask if my style comes to me easily. It comes easily, I hope, to you. Let a last word of confession tell you the rest.

The day’s writing having been finished, with such corrections of words and such rebalancing of sentences as occur to me at the time, is subjected to a first revision on the next day, and is then handed to my copyist. The copyist’s manuscript undergoes a second and a third revision, and is then sent to the printer. The proof passes through a fourth process of correction, and is sent back to have the new alterations embodied in the revise. When this reaches me, it is looked over once more before it goes back to press. When the serial publication of the novel is reprinted in book-form, the book-proofs undergo a sixth revision. Then, at last, I have done with the hard labour of writing good English; and (I don’t expect you to believe this) I am always sorry for it.

This probably confirms what we already know - what appears to us easy to read is the result of hard labour. The amount of time wasted trying to understand badly written documents (instructions, reviews, official directives, emails) proves that if the writer does not work hard, the reader must. Collins also confirms that the actual process of drafting and crafting is enjoyable, and the author can feel a sense of loss when it is complete.

Many writers and artists justifiably claim they work hard, but few worked as hard as Anthony Trollope, who combined his prolific career as a writer with a full-time job for the Post Office. We are indebted to him for the pillar box, a brilliant innovation which nevertheless was controversial at the time as it allowed women freedom to correspond at will and without male sanction!

There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office. I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession, I found it to be expedient to bind myself to certain self-imposed laws…

Averaging ten thousand words a week himself, he advised would-be novelists of the need to see writing as labour rather than a response to inspiration or genius.

I therefore venture to advise young men who look forward to authorship as the business of their lives, even when they propose that that authorship be of the highest class known, to avoid enthusiastic rushes with their pens, and to seat themselves at their desks, day by day as though they were lawyers’ clerks; - and so let them sit until the allotted task be accomplished.

(He presumably considered young women needed no such persuasion to work.)

All this talk of hard work is my way of avoiding any myself, so I had better stretch some vellum, turn up the lamp, trim my nib and replenish the ink bottle almost immediately…