Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, quoted by Clive James in an essay on the craft of writing that was at once illuminating and embarrassing for me; much of it describes, with as much wit is in this sentence, the sorts of failings I detect in my prose (and, it follows, my thought).
There is often a correlation, I think, between how automatic prose is and how weak it is. For language to escape the anesthetizing effects of cliche, which weakens meaning by making words into tuned-out ambient noise, it must be novel -or at least not shopworn- in formulation. This requires effort, as does anything that deviates from normative patterns. But we should not escape from cliche by contorting language into unwieldy or inefficient forms, a mistake I make daily. James separates the various types of chaff:
“With the majority of bad writers the question [of meaning] never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually, they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of its components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with writing too bad to matter… What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability.”
I think that’s a fair description of much of what I’ve written in my life, and it doesn’t hurt to say so: there is something to be said for ambition (which I otherwise lack entirely), and it is after all only in trying that we learn to do. As James notes later, writers “must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is unrelenting self-criticism.” Without that, I suspect one has no hope of writing anything worthwhile except by accident; for this reason, it’s commendable to cringe while editing and flush when rereading one’s writing; indeed, I’m glad I dislike most of it, or it would be quite a lot worse. That said, self-criticism must not be so masochistic that we silence ourselves, unless we’ve determined that we’ve nothing to add, a rare and admirable conclusion I should probably reach more often.
