Scribd
Upload
13K views

Making Writing Simple - Priestley

The document discusses the author J.B. Priestley's approach to writing simply and directly for a wide audience, in contrast to younger critics who felt literature should be difficult and obscure. Priestley aims to write in a way that could be read aloud in a pub, feeling no separation from ordinary people. While some see simplicity as easy, Priestley finds it challenging to appear simpler than he is. His habit of simplification allows him to explain complex ideas concisely, such as introducing the work of C.G. Jung to radio listeners in under 14 minutes.

Uploaded by

Jerry Milton
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
13K views

Making Writing Simple - Priestley

The document discusses the author J.B. Priestley's approach to writing simply and directly for a wide audience, in contrast to younger critics who felt literature should be difficult and obscure. Priestley aims to write in a way that could be read aloud in a pub, feeling no separation from ordinary people. While some see simplicity as easy, Priestley finds it challenging to appear simpler than he is. His habit of simplification allows him to explain complex ideas concisely, such as introducing the work of C.G. Jung to radio listeners in under 14 minutes.

Uploaded by

Jerry Milton
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

MAKING WRITING SIMPLE

BY J.B.PRIESTLEY
(1894 - 1984)

At the end of a long talk with a youngish critic, a sincere fellow whose
personality (though not his values)I respect, he stared at me and then
slowly : ‘I don’t understand you. Your talk is so much more complicated –
subtle – than your writing. Your writing always seems to me too simple .’ And
I replied : ‘But I’ve spent years trying to make my writing simple. What you
see as a fault, I regard as a virtue .’

There was now revealed to us the gulf between his generation and mine.
He and his lot, matured in the early thirties, wanted literature to be difficult.
They grew up in revolt against the Mass Communication antics of their age.
They did not want to share anything with the crowd. Writing that was hard
to understand was like a password to their secret society. A good writer to
them was one who made his readers toil and sweat. They admired extreme
cleverness and solemnity, poets like political cardinals, critics who came to
literature like specialists summoned to consultation at a king’s beside.

A genuine author, an artist, as distinct from hacks who tried to please


the mob, began with some simple thoughts and impressions and then
proceeded to complicate his account of them, if only to keep away the fools.
Difficulty was demanded. Hence the vogue to Donne and Hopkins. Literature
had to respond to something twisted, tormented, esoteric, in their own
secret natures. In all this there was no pose and here their elders went
wrong about them. They could be accused not unjustly of narrowness and
arrogance, but not of insincerity. They were desperately sincere in believing
that the true artist must hide from the crowd behind a thicket of briers. They
grew up terrified of the crowd, who in this new Mass Age seemed to them to
be threatening all decent values.

But I was born in the Nineteenth century and my most impressionable years
were those just before 1914. Rightly or wrongly, I am not afraid of the crowd.
And art to me is not synonymous with introversion. ( I regard this as the
great critical fallacy of our time). Because I am what is called ‘an
intellectual’—and I am just as much ‘an intellectual’ as these younger chaps
—I do not feel that there is a glass wall between me and the people in the
nearest factories, shops and pubs. I prefer therefore a wide channel of
communications. Deliberately I aim at simplicity and not complexity in my
writing. No matter what the subject in hand might be, I want to write
something that a pinch I could read aloud in a bar-parlour. (And the time
came when I was heard and understood in a thousand bar-parlours).

I do not pretend to be subtle and profound, but when I am at work I try to


appear simpler than I really am. Perhaps I make it too easy for the reader, do
too much of the toiling and sweating myself. No doubt I am altogether too
obvious for the cleverest fellows, who want to beat their brains against
something hard and knotty. But then I am not impressed by this view of
literature as a cerebral activity.

Some contemporary critics would be better occupied solving chess problems


and breaking down cyphers. They are no customers of mine, and I do not
display my goods to catch. But any man who thinks the kind of simplicity I
attempt is easy should try it for himself, if only in his next letter to The
Times. I find it much easier now than I used to do but that is because I have
kept this aim in view throughout years of hardwork. I do not claim to have
achieved even now a prose that is like an easy pursuasive voice, preferably
my own at its best; but this is what I have been trying to do for years, quite
deliberately, and it is this that puzzled my friend, the youngish critic who
cannot help wanting something quite different.
This habit of simplification has its own little triumphs. Thus, I was asked to
pay a birthday tribute, on the air, to C. G. Jung, for whose work and
personality I have massive admiration. To explain Jung in thirteen and a half
minutes so that the ordinary listener could understand what the fuss was
about! My friends said it could not be done. The psychologists said it could
not be done. But I can reasonably claim, backed by first class evidence, that I
did it. It was a tough little task, but when I had come to the end of it I found,
like honey in the rock, a taste of delight.

You might also like