5 Counterintuitive Quotes About Writing

(Editor's note: Author Eli Burnstein shares five counterintuitive quotes about the craft of writing as explored in his book Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations.)

We’re so often told to make our writing clear that we’re liable to forget we also want it beautiful. Or so said 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, who in her famous injunction to “tell it slant” reminds us that richness of expression supersedes the literalist’s need for clarity; that ambiguity can emerge as much from an excess of meaning as from its lack; and that a halo of connotations does more to stir the reader than a dictionary definition.

Clarity may be an all-important stop on the writer’s road to beauty—and what a winding road that is—but it isn’t that journey’s end. For as any lover of reading knows, the best writing takes on, not just clear, but super-clear proportions, an incandescence you could almost call blurry. Slant writing, Dickinson reminds us, cuts deeper than clarity, overflowing the brain so you don’t just understand it with your head, but feel it in your gut.

Originality is so often touted as a literary virtue that we forget an equally important counter-truth—namely, that there’s nothing new under the sun. As American poet and essayist T. S. Eliot reminds us in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” every writer is stuck with the same stock of themes, storylines, and character types as those who came before them, which means that the only options left are to offer a cheap copy or fresh take; a derivative work or powerful retelling. Or as Eliot originally phrased it, “Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.”

Originality of effect is a virtue worth striving for, yet we should never forget that no less a scrivener than Shakespeare snatched nearly all his plots from ancient and contemporary sources. He didn’t need to invent every aspect of his plays from the bottom up; pulling off his creative heist through painstaking craftsmanship, what matters is that he made them his own.

Stories are how we make sense of the world: its dramas, its complications, its heartbreaks, its injustices. Yet it’s equally important, when we tell them, not to tie them up in a neat little bow. Why? Because reality is messier than that, and when the story becomes too clean—when it’s heroes and villains, good guys versus bad—it stops feeling lifelike, and rather than put us in touch with the world, insulates us from it instead. Instead of honest reportage, we get the world-simplifying action flick. Instead of a complex human tale, we get the comforting morality play.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote American journalist Joan Didion in her essay “The White Album,” because without some sense-making narrative, life is just too scary. Yet when we grip our pens too tight, and tidy up reality in order to fit our philosophy, we stop telling it how it is, and lose the world we’re trying to capture for the pretty picture that we’ve made of it. (As she writes in the same paragraph, “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.”)

The storyteller’s role, Didion reminds us, is to describe life, not explain it, and as tempting as it is to equip our stories with a point, it’s important not to have them make so much sense that they stop reflecting our experience. Didion’s quietly ambiguous comment about storytelling reminds us that we must develop themes, not advance theses, and explore tensions while resisting the urge to prematurely resolve them.

Writing is so often described as the pursuit of an idea that we forget its practice is at bottom a via negativa: We’re not so much chasing after something we know as rejecting everything that ain’t it. As Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett explored in his experimental novel Worstward Ho, writing doesn’t feel like we’re approximating some model that’s fully formed in our heads, but crossing out, time and again, whatever the mind suggests. “Fail again. Fail better,” the struggling writer-narrator tells himself, because every word you strike out in frustration, every paragraph you exasperatedly rejig, digs you deeper beneath what feels familiar or flat and brings you closer to articulating something fresh. And it’s a good thing, too, because if we already knew what we wanted to say, then writing wouldn’t be the half-crazed, half-joyful process of self-discovery that it is, nor would its results bear the stamp of life.

Beckett’s strange anti-advice reminds us that we don’t transcribe ideas that already exist, but grope in the darkness to discover something new. And by constantly throwing away whatever we’re unhappy with—with a repetitiveness that can feel borderline Sisyphean—our distaste for what we’ve created can gradually quiet to a hum and we are left with, well, not perfection, but something we can live with.

Speaking of repetition—indeed, speaking of freshness—let us close by observing that words, like flowers, can stale with use over time, and lose their power to evoke images, emotions, and ideas. The advice may not be all that original (that we are to resist cliches is pretty well known, indeed is a bit of a cliche itself), yet American poet Gertrude Stein made that old chestnut new again by taking one of the most overused images in all English literature and bashing us over the head with it.

Mirroring the folds of the flower itself, Stein’s implausibly vivid image of an oh-so-tired thing reminds us that cliche needn’t to be avoided altogether: We don’t need to find weirder and weirder metaphors that are harder and harder to relate to, but must bring to life that which has been done before, bending the same materials (flowers, oceans, eyes) to new and vivid purposes. The counterintuitive kernel of Stein’s point is this: Don’t steer clear of cliches—turn them inside out.

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