Slate's Bizbox
clive's lives: A guide to 20th-century culture.

Georg Christoph LichtenbergLessons on how to write.

By Clive James
Posted Friday, March 2, 2007, at 12:56 PM ET

(Continued from page 2)

With the majority of bad writers the question never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay "Politics and the English Language," they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. When Pope called genius an infinite capacity for taking pains, that was what he meant. The greatly gifted have almost everything by nature, but by bending themselves to the effort of acquirement, they turn a great gift into great work. Their initial arrogance is necessary and even definitive: Heinrich Mann was right to say that the self-confidence of young artists precedes their achievement and is bound to seem like conceit while it is still untried. But there is one grain of humility that they must get into their cockiness if they are ever to grow: They must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is an unrelenting self-criticism. "My dear friend," said Voltaire to a young aspirant who had burdened him with an unpublished manuscript, "you may write as carelessly and badly as this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some trouble."

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Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Reprinted from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James © 2007 by Clive James, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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