[00:01.52]Lesson 39
[00:03.44]What every writer wants
[00:11.73]How do professional writers ignore what they were taught at school about writing?
[00:19.84]I have known very few writers,
[00:22.18]but those I have known and whom I respect, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going when they first set pen to paper.
[00:33.22]They have a character, perhaps two;
[00:35.91]they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun;
[00:47.54]one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir,
[00:53.21]then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands.
[00:57.73]I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at school.
[01:03.33]In the breaking and remaking, in the timing interweaving, beginning afresh,
[01:10.07]the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began.
[01:17.55]This organic process,
[01:19.69]often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination.
[01:28.29]A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another and it is gone
[01:35.34]but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it.
[01:41.10]Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written.
[01:47.27]I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books;
[01:51.51]like adolescents they stand before the mirror,
[01:54.77]and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them.
[01:59.96]For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books,
[02:05.78]winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones,
[02:10.63]begging response from those around them.
[02:13.65]Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair.
[02:21.69]He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.
[02:26.49]This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader,
[02:31.13]to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please.
[02:40.70]A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back
[02:46.26]that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow.
[02:52.68]For this reason also the writer, like any other artist,
[02:56.48]has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort,
[03:02.18]no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within.
[03:07.86]A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart;
[03:12.04]he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of,
[03:17.70]and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself,
[03:23.02]from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.