The Writing of Essays - Page 2

hitch comes in. Get a
box of a different kind of pen and begin again, and so on again and
again until despair or joy arrests you.

As for a typewriter, you could no more get an essay out of a typewriter
than you could play a sonata upon its keys. No essay was ever written
with a typewriter yet, nor ever will be. Besides its impossibility, the
suggestion implies a brutal disregard of the division of labour by which
we live and move and have our being. If the essayist typewrite, the
unemployed typewriter, who is commonly a person of superior education
and capacity, might take to essays, and where is your living then? One
might as reasonably start at once with the Linotype and print one's wit
and humour straight away. And taking the invasion of other trades one
step further one might, after an attempt to sell one's own newspaper,
even get to the pitch of having to read it oneself. No; even essayists
must be reasonable. If its mechanical clitter-clatter did not render
composition impossible, the typewriter would still be beneath the honour
of a literary man.

Then for the paper. The luxurious, expensive, small-sized cream-laid
note is best, since it makes your essay choice and compact; and, failing
that, ripped envelopes and the backs of bills. Some men love ruled
paper, because they can write athwart the lines, and some take the
fly-leaves of their friends' books. But whosoever writes on cheap sermon
paper full of hairs should write far away from the woman he loves, lest
he offend her ears. It is good, however, for a terse, forcible style.

The ink should be glossy black as it leaves your pen, for polished
English. Violet inks lead to sham sentiment, and blue-black to
vulgarity. Red ink essays are often good, but usually unfit for
publication.

This is as much almost as anyone need know to begin essay writing. Given
your proper pen and ink, or pencil and paper, you simply sit down and
write the thing. The value of an essay is not its matter, but its mood.
You must be comfortable, of course; an easy-chair with arm-rests,
slippers, and a book to write upon are usually employed, and you must be
fed recently, and your body clothed with ease rather than grandeur. For
the rest, do not trouble to stick to your subject, or any subject; and
take no thought for the editor or the reader, for your essay should be
as spontaneous as the lilies of the field.

So long as you do not begin with a definition you may begin anyhow. An
abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion of the clown's entry
through the chemist's window. Then whack at your reader at once, hit him
over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the poker, bundle him
into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before