We are currently living in a dystopian reality, where it seems that fact is stranger than fiction. It’s gotten so weird that many writers have thrown up their arms in defeat, saying, why bother?
In these strange moments, there are two writers we can turn to for inspiration as we attempt to navigate through these rocky days.
Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (Amazon), and George Orwell, the author of 1984 (Amazon), lived through their own troubling times. And in their experiences, they’ve created works that eerily predicted scenarios that we are living through today. While one saw a future where we are consumed by pleasure, the other saw a world imposed by fear.
Yet, we are somewhere in between now, rolling from one end — our addictions to the other end our phobias. Writing allows us to recognize these temptations — these traumas — and how we respond to them. While we might not be able to write something that will honestly capture the moment or even rival it in uniqueness, we can write to understand our own perception of these crazy times.
Today, we are going to look at 10 quotes each from these iconic authors and find insights into their creative process.
Aldous Huxley:
- Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
- Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
- To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
- A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
- I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. ‘The first thing,’ I said, ‘is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.’
- I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.
- I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.
- I’ve never discussed my writing with others much, but I don’t believe it can do any harm. I don’t think that there’s any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate.
- Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
- Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
George Orwell:
- If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
- When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
- I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
- Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in … but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
- To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
- The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
- A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
- Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Interested in more writing quotes? Check out what Kurt Vonnegut or Haruki Murakami has to share.
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Elliot Chan 