bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 ::

Happy Mark Twain day
Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish. — Mark Twain (source: Daily Twain)
On this date, 170 years ago, Samuel L. Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri. He would grow up to become Mark Twain, one of the most successful and enduring literary figures in American history. He was audacious and iconoclastic in life and in his writing style. If ever there was a model for anyone who aspired to be a writer, it was he.

Like many Americans, I've admired Twain's style and storytelling since childhood. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, of course, fired my imagination, as I quietly dreamed of rebellion, of running away from home and building a raft to escape down the Mississippi. Later on, reading books like Life on the Mississippi, his short stories and novellas (Puddinhead Wilson and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg stand out in my memory), and his collection of wonderful essays, Letters from the Earth, I learned the power of social and political satire. Twain packed those works with sartorial wisdom -- enough quotable material to fill a good section of Bartlett's.

Then there's the man's correspondence -- his many letters, where you'll find many of his wittiest quotes. Among my favorites are those that discuss the craft of writing. The quote above is good advice for any writer or storyteller -- and advice Twain heeded in his own writing career. (His tall tale about the jumping frog from Calaveras County, California, was a big hit back East, where people didn't know from jumping frogs.) So, in honor of the man today, I give you a few, culled from Twain Quotes:
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
There's also a new biography about Twain, for those interested in sorting through 600-some pages.

Mark Twain, writing, literature

:: Andrew 07:45 + ::
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