Lafcadio Hearn urged the students of the University of Tokyo to study the construction of sentences—to write them over and over again until they were nearly perfect, saying:
A thing once written is not literature.... No man can produce real literature at one writing.... To produce even a single sentence of good literature requires that the text be written at least three times.... For literature more than for any other art the all-necessary thing is patience.
He advised the students to write a practice piece and put it away for a week. Then to revise it and put it away again, and to continue the process of revision until they could improve it no more.
Tolstoy rewrote his important work three or four times. Rossetti revised “The Blessed Damosel” in many editions until the last was quite unlike the first. Tennyson changed his productions over and again. Gray was fourteen years in perfecting the “Elegy.” It is notorious that Sir Walter Scott’s later novels, written at great speed, are much inferior to his earlier more leisurely work. Samuel Butler’s masterpiece “The Way of All Flesh” was under construction for twelve years.
All literary history furnishes examples of great authors who toiled long over their manuscripts. Macaulay devoted more time to revising his essays than to writing them. Their superiority over his history, as literary products, is revealed by study of them. The history was written more hurriedly. The essays are the product of nearly one hundred years ago, but they serve to illustrate the possibilities of our language and the beauties of thoughtful writing and intense thinking. We look elsewhere in vain for such adroit phrasing and such thunder-claps of climax. Study them, young man!
Some present-day writers criticize Macaulay for his long-drawn sentences, his reiteration and his wanderings from the narrative into a confusion of details. Yet Macaulay was imitated by essayists for fifty years. His style was the vogue. And Macaulay in turn had both praised and criticized in no feeble fashion his great predecessor, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had been the vogue for nearly a hundred years.
The men of greatest reputation as critics, Sainte-Beuve, Edmund Gosse, Macaulay, Saintsbury and others, put intensive study into what they wrote. If they were to review a book they made a study of the subject of the book and of the life and mentality of the author: and sometimes their production was of more use to the world than the book itself. Their works are not so much read in this money-making age, but they are among the great contributions to thoughtful literature and the student of journalism will read them with great profit to himself. For your own work is to be thoughtful work—work intended to persuade and influence readers to your own way of thinking.
Writing for newspapers differs from other literary work in this: the newspaper writer has little opportunity for revision. Almost all articles for daily sheets are written at a single sitting. The writers of editorial articles have several hours in which to compose and usually they get a proof sheet for revision. The writers of short news articles may read and correct their manuscript. But in the big offices as soon as the reporter who is writing an article of any considerable length has finished two or three pages they are grabbed by an office boy, hurried to a copy reader who revises them as best he may and rushes them to the composing room to be typed. The writer does not see his pages again, does not read them over, even, after writing them. All big reports—stories of great disasters, of football matches, of public meetings or demonstrations are prepared with this haste.
The play house and opera critics compose under these same trying conditions with no opportunity for leisurely thought or revision. It is difficult, indeed, to write of a great performance in a whirlwind of hurry, with less than two hours for deliberate and consecutive thought. The French critic’s way of presenting a news paragraph in the edition following the performance and reserving a carefully prepared review for a later-date publication commends itself; but the American newspapers continue to print exhaustive comments on first-night performances two or three hours after the fall of the curtain. The opera critic has the advantage of attending rehearsals of new operas and he may prepare parts of his article in advance, but rehearsals are spiritless, for performers have not the inspiration and response of the audience.