In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix Introduction When I was in college, a professor loaned me a book of Ernest Hemingway ’s selected letters. Because I loved Hemingway, and because I was a little startled that a professor had loaned me a book, I took it home and read it straightaway. For several hours, the letters engrossed me with their rich historical detail, their personal gossip, their casual wisdom. But at some point I hit upon a passage that cast everything else in deep shadow. It came from a note Ernest sent to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, and it consisted of two sentences: “You write a swell letter. Glad somebody spells worse than I do.” I believe these words altered the course of my life, or at least my life as a writer, in two very different ways: while they led to a moment of profound revelation, they also prolonged my belief in a harmful delusion. Let’s start with the happy stuff. Here’s why it was wonderful to discover that these two titans of literature couldn’t spell. A writer, especially a beginning one, spends much of her time being daunted. She’s daunted by the odds of getting published, by the breathless articles that claim (and have been claiming for more than a century) that fiction is a dying art form, by the rolling of the eyes she gets from her finance-major friends when she talks about her novel. But mostly she’s daunted by her veneration for certain authors and their works. Most writers became writers because one day they finished Sense and Sensibility or “Barn Burning” or The House on Mango Street and said to themselves , “Holy cow! I want to do that!” But doing that, one quickly learns, is incredibly hard. Compounding the problem is the fact that great writers make it seem like it’s easy. When we read The Lord of the Rings we don’t consider Tolkien’s decades of labor, when we read James Joyce we don’t think about how it took him an entire day to write three sentences. Instead, we conclude that an enormous gap exists between people like us and the mystical beings who create profound literature. But then, if we’re lucky, we learn that they were bad at spelling. Anyone with a mild interest in Hemingway and Fitzgerald knows about x | I n t r o d u c t i o n their alcoholism, their irascibility, their misogyny, et cetera, so it wasn’t news to me they had human foibles. But I’d always assumed that in terms of language usage they must have been perfect, that creating “Big TwoHearted River” or The Great Gatsby would have required a virtually superhuman facility with every aspect of writing. The fact that I didn’t have such facility, and didn’t expect to get it anytime soon, daunted me tremendously. So when I learned Ernest and F. Scott didn’t have total mastery either, it was like the scene in Rocky IV when Rocky makes Ivan Drago bleed, and his corner guy yells, “You see? He’s not a machine! He’s a man!” In short, it gave me courage. It led me to the essential discovery every beginning writer must make: the writers you idolize are not goddesses and gods (except for Chaucer), they are men and women who struggle with language just as much as you do. If you don’t accept that, you’ll never join their ranks. So that was the happy result of my discovery of Hemingway’s remark. I was emboldened and empowered by the knowledge that the gates of literature don’t deny entrance to someone just because he makes a few linguistic mistakes. Now for the bad news… The realization that these two men had spelling problems led me to believe in one of the more insidious fallacies about writing: I came to think that spelling and its cousins (grammar, syntax, punctuation, convention) were not important aspects of the creation of art, that they were matters for copy-editors and composition teachers. Character, plot, thematic implication —these, not pedantic rules of grammar, were the tools I would employ to construct my masterpieces. I thought about correcting linguistic errors the way a young doctor might think about taking blood pressure: if you’re any good, eventually you’ll have people do it for you. Utter nonsense, of course. To believe that it’s somehow artistic to maintain an ignorance of...

Share