The art of writing | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

George Orwell on Writing Clearly. THE BEST ADVICE I KNOW OF.

Anita Mathias — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:52:00 +0000

George Orwell on Writing Clearly. THE BEST ADVICE I KNOW OF. From “Politics and the English Language” What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.When you think of a […]

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John Gardner in The Art of Fiction on one’s innate ability to solve technical problems

Anita Mathias — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:37:00 +0000

Life by the inch is a cinch. Life by the yard is hard. John Gardner says, in The Art of Fiction that almost anyone, even a novice writer, can solve a small literary problem, for instance in presenting a character or scene. It’s the entire novel which can daunt. So he advises novices to write their stories […]

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Virginia Woolf on writing

Anita Mathias — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:24:00 +0000

To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant, that was his only lesson in the art of writing--Virginia Woolf on her father Leslie Stephen. Who said, “Learning to write is learning to think?” I would realize that time and again in my apprenticeship. You delete a tangled sentence, […]

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