The art of nonfiction: a guide for writers and readers - By Ayn Rand & Robert Mayhew Page 0,3

to thank the Ayn Rand Institute for its help, which took many forms. Finally, and as always, I wish to thank my wife, Estelle, for solving the many computer problems I encountered while working on this book, and for her many other forms of support.

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Preliminary Remarks

The first precondition of this course, and of any type of writing, is: do not get a sense of unearned guilt. If you have difficulty with writing, do not conclude that there is something wrong with you. Writing should never be a test of self-esteem. If things are not going as you want, do not see it as proof of an unknowable flaw in your subconscious.

Never take the blame for something you do not know. Be sure, however, to take the blame for writing errors you do know about. That much is open to your conscious mind, and pertains to how carefully you edit.

If you tell yourself you are guilty for not writing brilliant sentences within five minutes, that stops your subconscious and leads to a host of writing problems. Writing is not an index of psychological health. (Overconscientiousness is one reason a person might aspire to something too ambitious, and then blame himself if it does not come easily.) If you do have any guilt, earned or unearned, that is between you and your psychologist. When you sit down to write, however, you must regard yourself as perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent.

Of course, you are not omniscient and omnipotent; no human skill, if at all interesting, can be perfect every time. Properly, therefore, you should feel that you have the capacity to write well, but that it is difficult. And you should not want an easy job—you do not want to be a hack—and therefore you should take all the trouble, and have all the patience, that writing requires. Do not conclude, at the first difficulty, that you are hopeless. This is the sense in which you must feel omniscient and omnipotent: not that everything you write will automatically be perfect, but that you have the capacity to make your work what you want to make it.

This leads to a second point. Contrary to all schools of art and esthetics, writing is something one can learn. There is no mystery about it.

In literature, as in all the fine arts, complex premises must be set early in a person’s mind, so that a beginning adult may not have enough time to set them and thus cannot learn to write. Even these premises can be learned, theoretically, but the person would have to acquire them on his own. So I am inclined to say that fiction writing—and the fine arts in general—cannot be taught. Much of the technical skill involved can be, but not the essence.

However, any person who can speak English grammatically can learn to write nonfiction. Nonfiction writing is not difficult, though it is a technical skill. Its only difficulty pertains to a person’s method of thinking or psycho-epistemology.1 What you need for nonfiction writing is what you need for life in general: an orderly method of thinking. If you have problems in this regard, they will slow you down (in both realms). But writing is literally only the skill of putting down on paper a clear thought, in clear terms. Everything else, such as drama and “jazziness,” is merely the trimmings.

I once said that the three most important elements of fiction are plot, plot, and plot. The equivalent in nonfiction is: clarity, clarity, and clarity.

Harold Fleming, the author of Ten Thousand Commandments, once showed me a quotation he carried with him, from The Education of Henry Adams: “The result of a year’s work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in, on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play and variety.” Incidentally, there is not one extra word in this quotation. It is pruned down to the minimum necessary to express the thought. This is a fine way of making the point that clarity comes above all else. The first absolute is: be clear. Drama, jazziness, color—which can be added later—are never as important as clarity.

Nobody can learn to write without practicing, because there are so many subconscious integrations to be automatized. Nobody can write strictly by conscious effort. No matter how much theory you know, you will not be a good writer until you practice. Therefore, do not expect your first articles to be easy. They will be difficult, and as you develop