Continuing
from last time ... Twelve tips from the master:
1. All this
writing and just one book?
“I
explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more
than a single work ...”
2. The grind
gets it done:
“it
is not the desire to become famous but the habit of being laborious that enables
us to produce a finished work ...”
3. The effort
can even be tiring:
“Perhaps
some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning.”
4. Don’t
admit to being unoriginal:
“In
this book ... there is not a single event which is not fictitious, in which
there is not a single personage “a clef”,
where I have invented everything to suit the requirements of my presentation
...”
5. Just
because I use the first person, doesn’t mean it’s me!
“As
soon as she was able to speak she said: “My ——-” or “My dearest ——” followed by
my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author
of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’ or ‘My dearest Marcel.’”
6. It’s
really about YOU:
“every
reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself.”
7. Obsessive
writer, obsessive reader:
“the
writer, in creating each character, would have to present it from conflicting
standpoints so that his book should have solidity, he would have to prepare it
with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces as for an offensive, to
bear it as a load, to accept it as the object of his life, to build it like a
church, to follow it like a régime, to overcome it like an obstacle, to win it
like a friendship, to nourish it like a child, to create it like a world,
mindful of those mysteries which probably only have their explanation in other
worlds, the presentiment of which moves us most in life and in art.”
8. Don’t be
preachy-preachy – or at least don’t admit to it:
“that
vulgar temptation of an author to write intellectual works. A great indelicacy.
A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is
marked.”
9. They won’t
understand!
“I
was soon able to show an outline of my project. No one understood it.”
10. Be your
own favourite author:
“I
read the article [that I had written] forcing myself to imagine that it was
written by some one else. Then all my images, all my reflexions, all my
epithets taken by themselves and without the memory of the check which they had
given to my intentions, charmed me by their brilliance, their amplitude, their
depth.”
11. Just reveal
the great universal laws of human nature:
“It
is the feeling for the general in the potential writer, which selects material
suitable to a work of art because of its generality. He only pays attention to
others, however dull and tiresome, because in repeating what their kind say
like parrots, they are for that very reason prophetic birds, spokesmen of a
psychological law. He recalls only what is general.”
12. And remember,
for the publisher it’s all about the money:
“the
impenetrable solidity of certain commercial houses, booksellers’ for example or
printing presses, where the wretched author will never succeed, notwithstanding
the diversity of the persons employed in them, in discovering whether he is
being swindled or not.”
