Kipling 2-- On Writing

The essay to read is Clara Claiborne Park's "How Kipling Taught Me to Write", from the American Scholar. Since you have to pay to get the whole text, I'll extract my favorites from the advice she selects-- but really you should Read The Whole Thing. (Thanks to Reid for pointing me there).

First, the inscription over the fireplace in the ill- starred Vermont house, carved by his father John Lockwood Kipling: "Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man come work". Or, in my more Italianate way when I taught: "WRITE!-- ya can't write when you're dead!" (Or as Kipling put it in a poem, more subtly: "Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made/ By singing:- "Oh how beautiful!"- and sitting in the shade").

On "easy" writing: "I cannot write with ease or fluency, worse luck, and the fluenter the thing looks from the outside the more worriment and sweat it is for me to evolve".

And my favorite, on compression-- two metaphors: "... a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect... Read your final draft and consider carefully every paragraph, every sentence, and word, hacking out where requisite".

And: "Let it lie by to drain as long as possible At the end of that time, re- read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening".

I suspect when I can get this book I will have more to say-- or rather, Kipling will.