Writing is craft and art and spirtual exercise. To do it well is not easy - nor should it be. Those who dash off words by the bushel, never pausing to contemplate or change them, filling up space on a million Internet writing sites: such people are factory workers, battery hens, automatons. Their words are widgets or washers or wrenches thrown onto fast-moving conveyor belts, packed into boxes, and sent by container ships to whichever Writers Walmart is buying today.
True writing requires thought. Real thought requires time.
BEAUTIFUL WRITING
Tell Them It was Wonderful by Ludwig Bemelmans
Excerpt: The niceness of people could be seen here in their desire to flee from the city; all about us were other little grounded boats, on which men had labored after working hours, quiet, simple men with pipes and old clothes and without much money. The decks of their boats, high above the land and surrounded by grass, looked amusing; on them sat their wives and cooked on little oilburners or gasoline stoves. The boats were of comical design: impossible cabins were built on decks much too small for them and had to be broken up, with half a cabin in the stern and another piece of it stuck on in the bow. On some of them were little roof gardens with flowerboxes, hammocks, easy chairs, and even birdcages. They made up a little city of green, yellow, and blue houses that could swim away. It had none of that impersonal elegance or mass ugliness of manufactured things; everyone had done something with his own hands for his own pleasure. It was all so happy and sad and, above all, good; even the ground was nice, covered with coils of rope, old dinghies, rusted anchors, and green and red lanterns.
As the lights grew stronger in the little portholes and were reflected on the sides of the boats next to them, and the gramophones started to play, and the smell of food came out of imitation funnels, we stopped work and sat in the cabin while Mr. Sigsag told me of his youth.
A Smattering of Ignorance by Oscar Levant
Excerpt: It is hardly surprising, therefore, that present-day orchestral players in the more prominent ensembles have become almost as great prima donnas as the "glamour boys" of music whom they derisively decorate with that epithet. There is the charming and somewhat pathos-tinged experience of Bruno Walter's during one of his first guest appearances with the Philharmonic. Innocent and unwarned, he had endured for several rehearsals and the first pair of concerts the mannerisms of Alfred Wallenstein, the orchestra's brilliant first cellist, whose gaze was everywhere - on the music, in the hall, up at the ceiling - but not on Walter. Since the first cellist sits almost within baton's length of the conductor, his idiosycracy could hardly be overlooked.
At last, Walter invited him to a conference and said, "Tell me, Mr. Wallenstein, what is your ambition?"
The cellist replied that he someday hoped to be a conductor.
"Well," said the conductor, with his sweet and patient smile, "I only hope you don't have Wallenstein in front of you."
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Excerpt: Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa's hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos' hair is thick and straight. He doesn't need to comb it. Nenny's hair is slippery - slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur.
But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread.
The Thread That Runs So True by Jesse Stuart
Excerpt: The December wind whistled in the barren shoe-make tops, where the red birds hopped from limb to limb and chirruped plaintive notes. Snowbirds stood by the clumps of dead ragweed the snow hadn't covered. They were searching for a scanty supper of the frozen seeds. Though time was early on this short winter day, I thought darkness might come soon. Going up the mountain, I made excellent time. I followed the path all right. I had to break the snow, for no one had traveeled this path. I knew how to follow the path by the clumps of trees, rock cliffs, and fences. These were the landmarks to follow. When the path was covered in snow these landmarks still looked the same.
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
Excerpt: The sun had crackled into flames at the top; the mist was getting thin in places, you could see crooked lines of grey, like old cracks under spring ice. Tide on the turn. Snake broken up. Emeralds and sapphires. Water like varnish with bits of gold leaf floating thick and heavy. Gold is the metal of intellect. And all at once the sun burned through in a new place, at the side, and shot out a ray that hit the Eagle and Child, next the motor-boat factory, right on the new signboard.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Excerpt: I was waiting in line to register a letter in the Post Office at Thirty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue in New York. I noticed that the registry clerk was bored with his job - weighing envelopes, handing out the stamps, making change, issuing receipts - the same monotonous grind year after year. So I said to myself: "I am going to try to make that chap like me. Obviously, to make him like me, I must say something nice, not about myself, but about him. So I asked myself, 'What is there about him that I can honestly admire.'" That is sometimes a hard question to answer, especially with strangers; but, in this case, it happened to be easy. I instantly saw something I admired no end.
So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm: "I certainly wish I had your head of hair."
He looked up, half-startled, his face beaming with smiles. "Well, it isn't as good as it used to be," he said modestly. I assured him that although it might have lost some of its pristine glory, nevertheless it was still magnificent. He was immensely pleased. We carried on a pleasant little conversation and the last thing he said to me was: "Many people have admired my hair."
I'll bet that chap went out to lunch that day walking on air. I'll bet he went home that night and told his wife about it. I'll bet he looked in the mirror and said: "It is a beautiful head of hair."
I told this story once in public and a man asked me afterwards: "What did you want to get out of him?"
What was I trying to get out of him!!! What was I trying to get out of him!!!
If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can't radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to screw something out of the other person in return - if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.
Oh yes, I did want someing out of that chap. I wanted somthing priceless. And I got it. I got the feeling that I had done something for him without his being able to do anything whatsoever for me. That is a feeling that glows and sings in your memory long after the incident is passed.
The Trees by Conrad Richter
Excerpt: And still Worth wouldn't stop. Not till he had worked out his mind. He had to make a last splurge. This would be a mortal handy thing for a house, something you had to pay tax on if you had one down in Pennsylvania. He steadied the logs with wedges, marked them with a straight edge and chopped out a hole, dressing it smooth with axe and knife. Over the hole he plastered a few cross sticks and fast to the sticks the marriage paper the Conestoga dominie had given them. Worth had always plagued Jary for lugging such a useless thing around with her. But now that he greased it with bear's oil, he reckoned it might be of some account. It let the sun through like glass. Oh, then it was a sight to see in that dark cabin, a window light blazing up like it was a fire and making all the cubbyholes and corners plain as outside till you could see the marks the barkworms left on the logs.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Excerpt: And north of the Canyon de Chelly was the Shiprock, a slender crag rising to a dizzy height, all alone out on a flat desert. Seen at a distance of fifty miles or so, that crag presents the figure of a one-masted fishing-boat under full sail, and the white man named it accordingly. But the Indian has another name; he believes that rock was once a ship of the air. Ages ago, Manuelito told the Bishop, that crag had moved through the air, bearing upon its summit the parents of the Navajo race from the place in the far north where all peoples were made, - and wherever it sank to earth was to be their land. It sank in a desert country, where it was hard for men to live. But they had found the Canyon de Chelly, where there was shelter and unfailing water. That canyon and the Shiprock were like kind parents to his people, places more sacred to them than churches, more sacred than any place is to the white man. How, then, could they go three hundred miles away and live in a strange land?