Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and
sane. If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will
generally be right. Moreover again, no one can help him as much as
he can help himself. There is no job in the writing world that he
cannot have if he really wants it. Writing about something he
intimately knows is a sound principle. Hugh Walpole, that greatly
gifted novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very
sensibly began by writing about school-teaching. If you care to see
how well he did it, read "The Gods and Mr. Perrin." I would propose
this test to the would-be writer: Does he feel, honestly, that he
could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it
may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys' school? If so, he has a
true vocation for literature.
The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he
reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift,
lively, accurate observation. And since consciousness is a rapid,
shallow river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go
swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a
genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of
gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this
running stream. Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic. Of
ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away
and you never see their bright plumage again.
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