E.B. White: The Art of the Essay (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
E.B. White
How do you get yourself to write? E.B. White has some words of advice (personally, I second the suggestion of an occasional drink):
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer -- he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor -- as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper . . . .
There are two faces to discipline. If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it. The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds. This takes stamina and resolution. Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up -- he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get. This varies from one time to maybe twenty.
E.B. White is perhaps most widely known for his and William Strunk's The Elements of Style and his novel Charlotte's Web (1952). His other works include Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1929), Here Is New York (1949), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) His Paris Review interview was published in 1969.
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