As previously mentioned, Stella Gibbons makes some insightful comments about writers, writing and the imagination in her novel My American, in which Amy Lee is the main character. Amy's love of reading, writing and research and her need for solitude as a young girl are all very typical of people who grow up to be writers.
This article contains some particularly significant extracts with the commentary they inspire:
Freely flowing words and ideas
What Stella Gibbons says about Amy's writing is a good description of what it feels like when the ideas and words come easily:
“Her stories never stuck, but sometimes she enjoyed writing them more than she did at other times. When the pen flew and her hand ached, when there was nothing real in the world except the white paper before her and the flying tip of the nib, and the picture in her mind that she was describing turned so quickly into words that she could no longer tell at what instant the figures in it became marks on the paper—then the story was Beginning to Run, and unfortunate is the writer who has never tasted such a moment.”
Unfortunate indeed is the writer whose creations are never fluent and painless - or frictionless as Rudyard Kipling would say.
And yes, the whole outer world often does disappear for some people when they are engrossed in reading or writing.
More freely flowing words and ideas
After getting a job as an office girl, Amy is sent to collect some copy from a very famous writer who has produced many stories for the boys’ magazine she works for.
He is never stuck for ideas. He tells her this:
“My head was always full of stories and people, people, people, all struggling and bursting to get out. It was like having a circus inside me; I couldn’t get the people out fast enough...”
“It’s the most delightful trade in the world, you know...If you’re my kind of writer. It’s pain and grief to some of us, of course, but not to me. Never to me. I don’t know what it means to have to hunt for ideas. Even now, after forty years of steady work, they come faster than I can get them down. That’s pretty wonderful, isn’t it?
It’s a gift, of course; just a gift like gorgeous red hair or a singing voice; you can only use it properly or abuse it. If you use it properly you’ve every right to be proud of what you’ve done with it, but not of the gift itself. Go down on your knees fasting and thank Whatever you believe in for the gift itself.”
He is one of the lucky ones in that the flow of ideas never stops and, as Rudyard Kipling would put it, his daemon has never refused to cooperate. And yes, the ability to write may be a gift but it is up to the writer to cultivate and train it and use it only for good purposes.
Keeping the daemon happy
Amy is conscious of what works and what doesn't work where getting inspirational material for her writing is concerned:
“She had discovered that her imagination worked best upon facts, stated in books of reference. On the few occasions that she had attempted to report, rather than to imagine, an incident, she had done bad work; once, in the middle of writing a book, she had gone to watch a liner sail, but the description she had afterwards written had been spoiled by too much detail. She used to think: I only need a touch, to set my mind off, and experience had proved to her that this was true.”
So when Amy Lee does her bit by researching in books her daemon cooperates and inspires her, but when she tries to get information directly from real life the results are unsatisfactory. This bears out what Rudyard Kipling said about checking the facts and giving the daemon what it wants.
The effect on Amy's readers
“But just as it is useless to try and convey in words the freshness of woods in the early morning, so it is useless to try and convey in words the spell exercised by a writer of genius...”
'Spell' is the right word. I feel like that about many writers, especially Rudyard Kipling.
“She also had the gift of making the reader feel that life in her world was more exciting and desirable than life in the actual world. She was a natural writer, expressing herself in words as inevitably as an actor does in gesture or a composer in music...”
For many people, the life of the imagination is better than life in the real world. As for natural writers - and composers in music - interestingly, Stella Benson said that some people are set apart to work with words or musical notes.
The old gives place to the new
As a girl, Amy Lee writes one story after another:
“...the next day she had begun The Hero of the Desert which was about Colonel Lawrence, and had almost forgotten The Mummy’s Curse, as writers do forget their earlier works.”
Some people prefer to work on a string of small projects. As soon as one is off their hands, they let it go and start on the next one. Short stories and blog articles are very suitable vehicles for such people.
While someone who has spent many years researching for and constructing a long book, a biography for example, will probably never forget it, it is perfectly possible for some writers to forget their earlier works. The old creations become deeply buried and are replaced by the new.
Incidentally, an occupational hazard when forgetting the earlier work is re-inventing the wheel. I did that myself once: I had an idea for a blog article and did a lot of work on it only to find that I had already produced an article on the subject many years earlier - using almost exactly the same wording too!
First editions of Stella Gibbons's novels have blue and white dust jackets:
