7 tips from Schopenhauer on worthwhile writing

Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay “On Authorship and Style,” comes down to a simple idea: if you don’t have original ideas, don’t bother writing (We’ve visited this essay before). It’s not a comfortable message. And a writer who thinks she has the perspective to judge her ideas as historically significant has probably caught the hubris bug. If you’re trying to decide whether or not you have anything to offer world literature? Schopenhauer is willing to bet you don’t.

Here are some points he makes to help you decide:

1. A dose of humility never weakened any thesis

In general, the following rule holds good here as elsewhere, namely: what is new is seldom good; because a good thing is only new for a short time.

2. Ornate writing; insecure writer

We find them trying to envelop trivial ideas in grand words and to dress their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary expressions and the most outlandish, artificial, and rarest phrases. Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. With regard to their delight in bombast, and to their writing generally in a grand, puffed-up, unreal, hyperbolical, and acrobatic style, their prototype is Pistol, who was once impatiently requested by Falstaff, his friend, to “say what you have to say, like a man of this world!“

3. Clear minds write clearly.

And yet nothing is easier than to write so that no one can understand; on the other hand, nothing is more difficult than to express learned ideas so that every one must understand them.

At my first job, my supervisor said to me that my main co-worker would be so smart she’d blow me away. She turned out to be one of the best educated stupid people I have ever worked with. When she left, I asked him what he’d meant by saying she was so smart. He said, “Well, when I talked to her I couldn’t understand a thing she said. I thought it must be because she had so much going on that I couldn’t follow it all.

4. Knowing what other people have said doesn’t mean you have anything to say.

Everyday authors are only half conscious when they write, a fact which accounts for heir want of intellect and the tediousness of their writings; they do not really themselves nderstand the meaning of their own words, because they take ready-made words and learn them. Hence they combine whole phrases more than words– phrases banales. This ccounts for that obviously characteristic want of clearly defined thought

5. Writers take care

On the other hand, intelligent people really speak to us in their writings, and this is why they are able to both move and entertain us. It is only intelligent writers who place individual words together with a full consciousness of their use and select them with deliberation.

6.Brevity is clarity’s first cousin

It is always better to leave out something that is good than to write down something that is not worth saying.

7. Obscurity,too,is unbecoming

By subjectivity I mean when a writer thinks it sufficient for himself to know what he means and wants to say, and it is left to the reader to discover what is meant. Without troubling himself about his reader, he writes as if he were holding a monologue; whereas it should be a ialogue, and, moreover, a dialogue in which he must express himself all the more clearly as the questions of the reader cannot be heard.

Bonus Round: Do you feel ready to take on the world with your pen in hand? Even if you do have what it takes, maybe you still shouldn’t bother. Should you and your Bic attain acclaim, whatever you had to say might still be doomed to obscurity.

Schopenhauer bemoans at length the bounty of valueless literature he had to wade through in the libraries and bookstores of his world. He wishes for fewer books, not more. I can’t imagine what he’d think of a bookstore today. Or of the Internet.

He inveighs most energetically against the writer who works only to leave an impression with his name, whether or not he wastes the time of readers whose time is precious. And no one’s time is more precious than yours, right? He also makes a distinction between two kinds of writers that illuminated, for me, the present world of blogs and specialty magazines and memoirs and the literary public’s obsession with context. It seems like nothing sells like first hand views and expert opinions. Schopenhauer disagrees. The writer or conversationalist who can only hold your interest when discussing his subject of interest has no value compared to the writer or speaker that is always interesting.

Though he seems to trust that true men of ideas will attain fame, even then, the public will honor them by pouring over their biographies more than they do the ideas that won them fame.

[The public] carefully investigates the real events or personal circumstances of the poet’s life which served to give the motif of his works; nay, finally, it finds these more interesting than the works themselves; it reads more about Goethe than what has been written by Goethe … This preference for matter to form is the same as a man ignoring the shape and painting of a fine Etruscan vase in order to make a chemical examination of the clay and colours of which it is made.