Thursday, June 2, 2011

Mark Twain On Style, and Writing with a Pen versus Typewriter

Mark Twain Autobiography, p. 224

"Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do the autobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory, it was too literary. With the pen in one’s hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traveled an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made.

"With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can’t help it. Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along the banks, cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time in reflections."

5 comments:

  1. Notice that first paragraph of Twain's: it has exactly THREE sentences. How many modern readers have the patience or attention span to get through that, much less appreciate its imagery and elegance?

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  2. Given how well the most recent edition of his autobiography sold, one hopes quite a few. Depressing to think all his private thoughts went unfinished, then pilfered, then published, then purchased and unused.

    In another way? Quite nice, though.

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  3. I really do hope we're at the beginning of a rebirth of interest in his work.

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  4. I was totally into Twain's comments and I agree with what he has to say about the flow of narrative.

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  5. Nice. Thanks Cathy! I'm trying to learn from him.

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