Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Scribble, scribble, scribble

Allan Massie

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Allan Massie on why writers write

More admirable is the simple pleasure to be had from making something, common to the practice of any art or craft. To bring into being what did not previously exist, and to present it in an agreeable shape, is deeply satisfying — even if the final result is always inevitably less than you looked to achieve. Plato was right: the ideal work of art exists only in the imagination and the reality must always disappoint. Fortunately however, in the least satisfactory work, there will usually be some pages, some scenes, some characters that delight their creator, and so persuade him to go on. This is why Eric Linklater, a couple of years before his death, was able to say that the best times in his life had been when he was working on a novel and it was going well.

Scott Fitzgerald thought it was ‘a hell of a profession’ — I prefer the word trade; also that ‘you don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say’. That’s questionable. If you have something to say, you write an article, not a novel. A novel is, for writer and reader alike, a voyage of exploration; in the writer’s case it’s a way of entering unknown territory and finding out what he thinks and feels. If he can take the reader with him all the way to the end, so much the better. But for him the journey itself is enough. Curiosity sets narrative going and the writer, like the reader, will, if all goes well, find himself surprised by much that he writes. Write because you have something to say? No: it’s a novel, not a tract or argument. The old line — how do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said? — is more to the point.

Finally it’s an addiction. Few novelists retire — and not only because they can’t afford to. Without a book to work on, we wouldn’t know how to get through the day.

To that extent, writing is an escape from boredom; also, oddly, from yourself.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books