An Interview With Jacques Barzun

It may be a talk, an email, a lesson, a shopping list, or a journal entry. One way or another, we all have to write and sometimes it is overwhelming! Here are some thoughts about writing shared during an imaginary interview with writer Jacques Barzun. The answers are from his book of essays On Writing, Editing and Publishing. The questions are mine.

I’m so busy! I don’t think I have time to write. I have to clean the house, do my church calling, spend time with my husband and homeschool my kids! How can I write?

There is only one way: to study one’s needs and quirks, and circumvent one’s tricks for escape!

Okay, okay. I’ll give it a try. I have so many ideas, but I can’t figure out what to say!

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands. Just put it down, then another. Your whole first paragraph may have to be guillotined in any case after the piece is finished . . . But as modern mathematics has discovered, there can be no second paragraph until you have a first.

Any other helpful hints or recommendations?

In writing, always keep your feet warm, unless you are a full-blooded Indian accustomed to thinking great thoughts while walking barefoot in icy streams.

Sometimes I get so frustrated when I write! I can’t think of the right word or decide how to organize my thoughts.

[Remember the] law of momentum . . . for writers who have experienced difficulty and discouragement, the proper aim is that of the learner on the bicycle—keep going, which means at a certain speed.

How can I ever hope to be a great writer like the ones I read about in history?

As a reader of history I am steadily reminded that writing has always been a hit-and-miss affair. Here is Amos Barrett, our chief source on the battles of Concord and Lexington: “It wont long before their was other minit Compneys. . . We marched Down about a mild or a mild half and we see them accoming . . .” and so on. An illiterate New England farmer? Not so, since he could write; he had been taught and in some way represents the past. The question he poses is, how do [most] people write? The answer is: badly, at all times.

Okay, but I know that Lincoln wrote some amazing speeches! How did he become such a great writer?

Lincoln acquired his power over words in the only two ways known to man—by reading and by writing. [He practiced over the years and] by the time he was in the White House he could frame, impromptu, hundreds of messages such as this telegram to [do-nothing] General McClellan: “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horse. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”

Writing seems so old fashioned. Can’t I just text my friends and post videos on youtube instead?

Although it is possible to think without words and to communicate by signs, our civilization depends . . . on the written word. Writing is embodied thought, and the thought is clear or muddy, graspable or fugitive according to the purity of the medium. Communication means one thought held in common. What could be more practical than to try making that thought unmistakable?

Thanks! I think I’ll write something for my blog!