{source}

The most important thing is, there is no most important thing - nothing like "pay your commas well and don't overwork them." Your books are like people. Somebody may give you a piece of advice for dealing with one, and it may be good and sound advice, but the minute you wield it as The Solution, you reduce the story to a one-dimensional piece of triteness. Either you're in the boat or not; what happens thereafter isn't a matter to be handled with anecdotes. Purpose to with your writing as you do with people: committed to it because that is what God has called you to do as one created in His image. And then get in the boat and get on with it.

(This is so short because I've had better things to do than keep up with this, and because the only other two points I would make - read good books, and just write something - have been more than aptly made by Jenny.)


I love Jane Austen. I love Rosemary Sutcliff. I love all my aspiring author friends, the published and the yet-to-be-published. I love the lasses of my childhood: L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott (a grudging, half-withheld sort of love here), Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maud Hart Lovelace...

But really, if I could be one author - it would be Dorothy Sayers. Whether she is writing Wimsey with his walking-stick-sword and detectivating powers or plying her wit against the insipid churchisms of her (and our) day, she's fantastic. As a writer of fiction, of the poetic, she is charming. Straight philosophy comes trippingly off her tongue and falls with equal ease on the ears without tickling the intellect to sleep. Even with Chesterton, one has to do a good deal of slogging while he commits straight philosophy. Sayers contrives to be companionable and yet leaves the mind ringing with truth.

0 Missages