A Discussion of Q
April 4, 2019

In my last post I mentioned Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing[1] but 
only described it in passing. Yet if I could only recommend one book on writing,
"Q" (as he was known) would be it.

That's a heavy weight to place upon a slim book, but On the Art of Writing can
bear it. The book itself is a collection of lectures Quiller-Couch gave at
Cambridge University in 1913-14 on writing and English literature. In his
lectures, he is a font of advice and suggestions: writers of prose should
practice verse as well, writing should be appropriate to the audience and
situation. It should be accurate, and here Q suggests that a writer use the
concrete word to the abstract one, use active and transitive verbs, and prefer
the direct word to what he calls the "circumlocution." He's also the ur-source
of the famous writing quote "Murder your darlings," meaning to get rid of that
beautiful sentence that you just love but which doesn't actually add anything to
your piece. Finally, he recommends writing verse and prose that could be sung or
read out loud and still be pleasurable.

As for style in writing, Quiller-Couch feels that it's similar to manners. A
writer owes it to a reader, he says, to think of the reader's comfort and
convenience, and in such a way as to respect the effort the reader is putting
forth to read and understand one's writing. Beautiful prose, though, also
requires an ear able to detect two things: the single, right point of emphasis
in a sentence, and the interplay of vowel sounds within and between the words.

Q hates jargon, which he believes comes from two sources: an author's laziness
or his timidity. Jargon is used to mask inexact thinking or to dodge
responsibility, and here Quiller-Couch prefigures Orwell's "Politics and the
English Language" by more than thirty years.

He also provides his own list of "working books," which is far shorter than
mine. Were he limited to three books, Q feels he could teach writing using only
the King James Version of the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and
Homer. It's hard to argue with that list, because all three are gems in the
crowns of both English literature and poetry.

And all this advice is given with humor and wrapped up in that luscious
late-19th/early-20th-century prose style that I love to read. As a writer,
reading Q's little book is time well-spent.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17470 

(c) 2019 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com