Articles & Reviews

Ask most writers and they’ll tell you that the hand that writes reviews and criticism is not the hand that writes fiction. ‘500 words by next week’: depending on which side of the bed you’ve got out of in the morning, those words are either a chilling shackle on the creative expansiveness of spirit of the writer jobbing as freelance hack, or necessary discipline, an exercise good for both the soul and style, teaching important things such as economy with words, precision, concision.

And then there is the usual touchiness of writers when they see what has been done to their precious reviews, over which they have toiled for days (and of course it’s the most important review in the books pages that week, if not the Review of the Year), cutting down 518 words to 506, then adding that absolutely vital sentence about the overuse of similes that steps it up to 534, then spending the rest of the morning deleting their own similes, joining words to create compound words with hyphens that’ll shave down 2 words to 1, polishing their apercus, sharpening that rapier point, labouring away the entire morning putting that comma in, then the entire afternoon taking it out … On the weekend, they open the newspaper to see that someone has taken a savage pair of secateurs to their perfect canvas and shredded it to ribbons. Style, wit, elegance, all lie in the dust. 500 words reduced to 379. The epigram Et in Arcadia ego removed. The erudite reference to Miklós Jancsó and postwar Hungarian cinema rudely discarded. When the TLS sent Henry James the proofs of one of his magisterial reviews, with one and a half sentences removed, James resent it to the editor with the note, ‘Dear Richmond, Here’s the bleeding corpse. Yours is a butcher’s trade.’

Which writer hasn’t felt that resentment? But newspapers are businesses, not literary charities; they need to sell copies and the exigencies of newspaper publishing – space, target readership, advertisements, a type of clarity in style that is often not congruent with the kind of clarity we find in literary styles – will forever appear to be hostile, at least some of the time, to untrammeled creativity. For all that it is worth, I have restored, for this site, the original versions of the copies I filed to newspapers. A large part of the reason for doing so is the characteristic control-freakery of the writer or, if you are disposed to see it more charitably, a sense of purism.

As for the irresoluble conflict between the two kinds of writing – fiction and journalism/criticism – that is another world, another knotty mass of ideas and problems altogether, and for a recent pithy and typically witty piece on that topic see  the wonderful Hilary Mantel in theGuardian.