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I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so
that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who
has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such
a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital
while it is new. |
 From St. Nicholas Magazine, August 1916. From the Dave Thomson collection |
Well, my book is written--let it go. But if it were only to write over again
there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying;
but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library--and
a pen warmed up in hell.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 22 Sept 1889 (referring to A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court)
I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days and I could have added
a fortnight's labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether.
I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger
than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked
every night from eleven or twelve until broad daylight in the morning, and as
I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words
a day- nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for
plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living
in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the
Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904) my average
seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
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.
- Letter to Orion Clemens, 23 March 1878
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.
By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you
really want to say.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
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.
- Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868
Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously
store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its
fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which
we call our style.
- Letter to George Bainton, 15 Oct 1888; (first printed in The Art of Authorship:
Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners, Personally
Contributed by Leading Authors of the Day. Compiled and Edited by George
Bainton. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890, pp. 85-88.)
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.
- Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880
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 Recommended resource: HOW TO WRITE ABOUT MARK TWAIN by R. Kent Rasmussen. Available from amazon.com |
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