Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.
Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.
See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.
The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants."
[Getting Into Print (The Editor magazine, March 1903)]
Tag: writing creative-process
Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity--a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices.
Jack LondonHe was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.
Jack LondonAt first, this earth, a stage so gloomed with woe
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes
And yet be patient. Our playwright may show
In some filth act what this wild drama means.
But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime - ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud- dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment.
Jack LondonTag: saints-in-slime
A exploração da mão-de-obra, os salários de miséria, as hordas de desempregados e a multidão sem abrigo e sem casa é o espectáculo a que se assiste quando há mais homens do que trabalho.
Jack LondonQuando a procura é maior do que a oferta, impera a selecção. Em todos os ramos da indústria, os menos competentes são rejeitados - e, como os recusam, já não estão em condições de se manterem à tona, pelo que descem até atingirem o nível em que os aceitam, um emprego numa fábrica em que não lhes seja exigida nenhuma aptidão. Consequência inevitável: os menos aptos deixam-se arrastar até ao fundo do abismo, essa espécie de matadouro onde ficam reduzidos à miséria.
Jack LondonQuando há mais homens que trabalho, todos os que sobram são relegados para o contingente dos incapazes e como tal ficam condenados a uma destruição penosa e progressiva.
Jack LondonA supremacia de determinada classe só pode impor-se por via da degradação das outras classes sociais.
Jack LondonÉ indispensável retirar dos postos de comando todos os gestores que, estúpida e criminosamente, puseram o império à beira da falência. Fizeram um trabalho de sapa e revelaram uma incompetência invulgar, além do que desviaram fundos públicos. Cada pobre exausto e destroçado, cada cego, cada criança nascida na cadeia, cada homem, cada mulher e cada criança torturados pela fome sofrem simplesmente porque a riqueza comum foi desviada por todos esses governantes. Nenhum dos responsáveis dessa classe dirigente pode deixar de ser condenado na barra do tribunal da Humanidade.
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