G eoffrey Ashe’s column

-^SV IC E

TO AUTHORS

MAGAZINES LIKE Resurgence have a high proportion of readers who want to write themselves. They may not want to write for Resurgence. They may not want to write at all, to the extent of actually trying it; the desire may be just a feeling. But a certain number do try it, and that is one reason why such magazines keep on having something to print.

I was once asked to suggest a few guidelines for would-be authors. After much thought, half a dozen took shape. I would like to recall them here. After all, Resurgence offers advice to readers who want to grow food, run communes, or engage in spiritual adventures. Why shouldn’t it also offer advice to readers who want to write —an activity that is small-scale, non-bureaucratic, and (when you come to think of it) essential to putting over all the other advice?

These, anyway, are the pointers which I came up with. They still strike me as reasonably sound. Write about what you know and care for

That principle is absurdly obvious. Yet an odd quirk of human nature fights against it. Editors who get many unsolicited scripts are constantly bothered with articles or stories that reveal the authors’ abysmal ignorance of what they are writing about. Why do they do it? From a wish to voice their prejudices? From a feeling that the chosen topic is what they ought to be writing about? From a compulsion to write something, however half-baked, and get into print somehow? I don’t know. It happens. When in Canada I heard of an art class in a small prairie town. One of the instructor’s hardest tasks was to persuade the members to draw cows or farmhouses, which they knew well. They preferred exotic subjects like Rhineland castles, which few had ever seen.

And yet... how well people can talk or

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write, how fascinating they can be, when dealing with what they do know, with what really concerns and stirs them! Bear that in mind, and beware of the perverse tendency to do otherwise. Approach your readers through their own interests rather than yours

Here we move closer to the special problems of writing on behalf of a Cause, and therefore to the problems of many who read Resurgence. The people who have a Cause - revolutionary, ecologist, pacifist —are apt to insist on preaching their own message in their own style with their own jargon. They enlarge on their burning issues (and yes, fair enough, they probably are) without considering that the vast majority of their fellow-citizens never even think about them, and are not disposed to listen.

If you murmur that the general public too has its own interests, they may sneer that they don’t care about its interests and have no intention o f pandering to it —their job is to force it into concern for something else. All right. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating: they usually fail. The formula, so far as there is one, is to relate the message to interests which people have already. Make it relevant to them. Use meaningful jumping-off points. As Lenin remarked, “A true revolutionary can use a dish-rag to further the revolution.” A journalist o f my acquaintance, who gave extremely well-informed talks on Soviet Communism, used to hook audiences o f non-political houswives by telling them what an orange cost in Moscow. Don’t let readers hover uncertainly. Make it plain fairly quickly what you are talking about, and leave them with an ending as strong and expressive as the beginning.

As a backwoods preacher put it: “ First I tells ’em what I’m going to tell ’em. Then I tells ’em. Then I tells ’em what I’ve told ’em.” A good method. How far you should really keep rubbing in your theme is a matter for judgment. However, your reader should definitely know what it is from the first paragraph or two, and be left at the end with a forceful point arising out of it. Lincoln’s theme in that model of prose the Gettysburg Address is the democratic ideal which the North, in his view, was fighting for. He begins and closes with that ideal. (I won’t quote the Address. Look it up.) Start from what is familiar, or at least easily grasped, and proceed from that to the unfamiliar and difficult

Too many serious articles, in Resurgence and elsewhere, begin with specialised language, or generalisations hard for the unprepared to absorb, or references to topics or persons little known beyond the confines of an ‘in’ group. The reader has to be knowledgeable already to slog his way into them at all.

If you were writing about a past event in some famous place, let us say the

Battle of Culloden, would you begin by saying “ In 1746 Prince Charles Edward Stuart and the Duke of Cumberland” , etc? Or would you begin by describing Culloden Moor as the tourist sees it today, and then lead into the history? At the risk of sounding like a mere vulgar journalist, I prefer the second approach. If you wanted to explain a point in chemistry, would you begin with molecules and formulae, or with a playby-play account of some simple relevant event, such as the lighting of a match? Likewise. Tell things, so far as you can, through concrete examples and anecdotes, and through people rather than abstractions

Arthur Christiansen, the great editor who built up the Daily Express, used to say: “ There is nothing that can’t be told in terms of people.” You may dislike the Express, but you shouldn’t be above taking a tip from its chief creator. If you still insist that you won’t have anything to do with Christiansen, you may prefer Christ. His parables show his mastery of the same truth. When he wanted to make his audience think about repentance and forgiveness, he didn’t content himself with edifying remarks like “ I t’s never too late to mend” . He told them the story of the Prodigal Son —concise, beautiful, and not easily forgotten. Treat your readers with courtesy and respect

This rule is double-edged. On the one hand, put yourself in the readers’ place, appreciate their point of view. Imagine them reading what you write and anticipate their probable difficulties. Don’t use language that is likely to be outside their range. Don’t go on and on without explanation about things they are unlikely to grasp if explanation is lacking. Don’t force them to keep stopping and thinking and re-reading, or looking up unusual words in the dictionary.

But remember the converse also. If you try too hard to meet them half-way, you may slip into an opposite fault and talk down to them. This is a special hazard in writing for children, but it is not confined to that. For many years journalism and advertising were needlessly stultified by a notion that the mental age of the public is twelve. Not so. Of course there are many things which people don’t readily respond to above a twelve-year-old level, because they haven’t the interest or the mental equipment required. Your business as a writer, however, is not to accept that limitation (‘giving the public what it wants’) but to make them respond better than that. It can be done. The will to do it can only be sustained by a basic respect.

Those are my six pointers. But if you aspire to write, never imagine that this or any other advice can do the job for you. When Sinclair Lewis was invited to launch a university course on creative authorship, he asked the students: “How many of you actually want to write?” Every student raised a hand. Lewis said: “ Then why the hell aren’t you at home writing?” £2