Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  People who send you a form letter, with your name filled in (misspelled), asking for an autographed photograph, and with no envelope or postage supplied.

  Teachers who flog a class of thirty into each sending you a letter telling you how they liked a story of yours, and sending you a sweet letter of her own asking you to send a nice answer to each one of the little dears.

  And so on—

  Well, then, why write?

  A seventeenth-century German chemist, Johann Joachim Becher, once wrote: “The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisOns and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that may I die if I would change places with the Persian King.”

  Well, what goes for chemistry, goes for writing. I know all the miseries, but somewhere among them is happiness. I can’t easily explain where it is or what it consists of, but it is there. I know the happiness and I experience it, and I will not stop writing while I live—and may I die if I would change places with the President of the United States.

  Revisions

  When it comes to writing, I am a “primitive.” I had had no instruction when I began to write, or even by the time I had begun to publish. I took no courses. I read no books on the subject.

  This was not bravado on my part, or any sense of arrogance. I just didn’t know that there were courses or books on the subject. In all innocence, I just thought you sat down and wrote. Naturally, I have picked up a great deal about writing in the days since I began; but in certain important respects, my early habits imprinted me and I find I can’t change.

  Some of these imprinted habits are trivial. For instance, I cannot leave a decent margin. Editors have tried begging and they have tried ordering, and my only response is a firm “Never!”

  When I was a kid, you see, getting typewriting paper was a hard thing to do for it required m-o-n-e-y, of which I had none. Therefore what I had, I saved—single-spaced, both sides, and typing to the very edge of the page, all four edges. Well, I learned that one could not submit a manuscript unless it was double-spaced on one side of the page only; and I was forced, unwillingly, to adopt that wasteful procedure. I also learned about margins and established them—but not wide enough. Nor could I ever make them wide enough. My sense of economy had gone as far as it would go and it would go no farther.

  More important was the fact that I had never learned about revisions. My routine was (and still is) to write a story in first draft as fast as I can. Then I go over it, and correct errors in spelling, grammar, and word order. Then I prepare my second draft, making minor changes as I go and as they occur to me. My second draft is my final draft. No more changes except under direct editorial order and then with rebellion in my heart.

  I didn’t know there was anything wrong with this. I thought it was the way you were supposed to write. In fact when Bob Heinlein and I were working together at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia during World War II, Bob asked me how I went about writing a story and I told him. He said, “You type it twice? Why don’t you type it correctly the first time?”

  I felt bitterly ashamed; and the very next story I wrote, I tried my level best to get it right the first time. I failed. No matter how carefully I wrote, there were always things that had to be changed. I decided I just wasn’t as good as Heinlein.

  But then, in 1950, I attended the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference at the invitation of Fletcher Pratt. There I listened in astonishment to some of the things said by the lecturers. “The secret of writing,” said one of them, “is rewriting.”

  Fletcher Pratt himself said, “If you ever write a paragraph that seems to you to sing, to be the best thing you’ve ever written, to be full of wonder and poetry and greatness—cross it out, it stinks!”

  Over and over again, we were told about the importance of polishing, of revising, of tearing up and rewriting. I got the bewildered notion that, far from being expected to type it right the first time, as Heinlein had advised me, I was expected to type it all wrong, and get it right only by the thirty-second time, if at all.

  I went home immersed in gloom; and the very next time I wrote a story, I tried to tear it up. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I went over it to see all the terrible things I had done, in order to revise them. To my chagrin, everything sounded great to me. (My own writing always sounds great to me.) Eventually, after wasting hours and hours—to say nothing of spiritual agony—I gave it up. My stories would have to be written the way they always were—and still are.

  What is it I am saying, then? That it is wrong to revise? No, of course not—any more than it is wrong not to revise.

  You don’t do anything automatically, simply because some “authority” (including me) says you should. Each writer is an individual, with his or her own way of thinking, and doing, and writing. Some writers are not happy unless they polish and polish, unless they try a paragraph this way and that way and the other way.

  Once Oscar Wilde, coming down to lunch, was asked how he had spent his morning. “I was hard at work,” he said.

  “Oh?” he was asked. “Did you accomplish much?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Wilde. “I inserted a comma.”

  At dinner, he was asked how he had spent the afternoon. “More work,” he said.

  “Inserted another comma?” was the rather sardonic question.

  “No,” said Wilde, unperturbed. “I removed the one I had inserted in the morning.”

  Well, if you’re Oscar Wilde, or some other great stylist, polishing may succeed in imparting an ever-higher gloss to your writing and you should revise and revise. If, on the other hand, you’re not much of a stylist (like me, for instance) and are only interested in straightforward storytelling and clarity, then a small amount of revision is probably all you need. Beyond that small amount you may merely be shaking up the rubble.

  I was told last night, for instance, that Daniel Keyes (author of the classic “Flowers for Algernon”) is supposed to have said, “The author’s best friend is the person who shoots him just before he makes one change too many.”

  Let’s try the other extreme. William Shakespeare is reported by Ben Jonson to have boasted that he “never blotted a word.” The Bard of Avon, in other words, would have us believe that, like Heinlein, he got it right the first time, and that what he handed in to the producers at the Globe Theatre was first draft. (He may have been twisting the truth a bit. Prolific writers tend to exaggerate the amount of nonrevision they do.)

  Well, if you happen to be another Will Shakespeare, or another Bob Heinlein,1 maybe you can get away without revising at all. But if you’re just an ordinary writer (like me) maybe you’d better do some.(As a matter of fact, Ben Jonson commented that he wished Will had “blotted out a thousand,” and there are indeed places where Will might have been—ssh!—improved on.)

  Let’s pass on to a slightly different topic.

  I am sometimes asked if I prepare an outline first before writing a story or a book.

  The answer is: No, I don’t.

  To begin with, this was another one of those cases of initial ignorance. I didn’t know at the start of my career that such things as outlines existed. I just wrote a story and stopped when I finished, and if it happened to be one length it was a short story, and if it happened to be another it was a novelette.

  When I wrote my first novel, Doubleday told me to make it 70,000 words long. So I wrote until I had 70,000 words and then stopped—and by the greatest good luck, it turned out to be the end of the novel.

  When I began my second novel, I realized that such an amazing coincidence was not likely to happen twice in a row, so I prepared an outline. I quickly discovered two things. One, an outline constricted me so that I could not breathe. Two, there was no way I could force my characters to adhere to the outline; even if I wanted to do so, they refused. I never tried an outline again. In even my most complicated novels, I merely fix the endin
g firmly in my mind; decide on a beginning; and then, from that beginning, charge toward the ending, making up the details as I go along.

  On the other hand, P. G. Wodehouse, for whose writings I have an idolatrous admiration, always prepared outlines, spending more time on them than on the book and getting every event, however small, firmly in place before begininning.

  There’s something to be said on both sides of course.

  If you are a structured and rigid person who likes everything under control, you will be uneasy without an outline. On the other hand, if you are an undisciplined person with a tendency to wander all over the landscape, you will be better off with an outline even if you feel you wouldn’t like one.

  On the third hand, if you are quick-thinking and ingenious, but with a strong sense of the whole, you will be better off without an outline.

  How do you decide which you are? Well, try an outline, or try writing without one, and find out for yourself.

  The thing is: Don’t feel that any rule of writing must be hard and fast, and handed down from Sinai. Try them all out by all means; but in the last analysis, stick to that which makes you comfortable. You are, after all, an individual.

  Irony

  It is well known that I know nothing about the craft of writing in any formal way. I say so myself—constantly. Being an editorial director, however, has its demands and duties. I must answer letters from readers, for instance, and take into account any unhappiness they may have with stories and editorial policy. And that means I am sometimes forced to think about writing techniques.

  That brings me to the subject at hand, the matter of the use of irony by writers.

  In the March 1984 issue, I discussed satire. The two are often lumped together, and, in fact, sometimes confused and treated as though they were synonymous. They are not!

  Satire, as I explained, achieves its purpose of castigating the evils of humanity and society by exaggeration. It puts those evils under a magnifying glass with the intention of making them clearly visible.

  Irony does it differently. You can get a hint from the fact that “irony” is from a Greek word meaning “dissimulation.” An ironist must pretend, and the classic ironist was Socrates, who in his discussions with others would relentlessly pretend ignorance and ask all kinds of naive questions designed to trap an overconfident adversary into rashly taking positions that then proved to be indefensible under further naive questioning by Socrates.

  Naturally, Socrates was not ignorant and the questions were not naive, and his method of procedure is known as “Socratic irony.” You may well believe that those who suffered under his bland lash did not grow to love him, and I suspect he fully earned his final draught of hemlock.

  Socrates set the fashion for irony for all time. He pretended to be ignorant when he was actually piercingly intelligent, and ever since then, ironists have pretended to believe and say the opposite of what they wanted the reader to understand. Instead of exaggerating the evils they are denouncing, they reverse them and call them good.

  The satirist induces laughter by his exaggeration, the ironist induces indignation by his reversal. The satirist is often good-natured, the ironist tends to be savage and bitter. Satire is a comparatively mild technique whose purpose is easily grasped. Irony is a difficult technique whose point is frequently missed, and the ironist may find he is holding a two-edged sword and is himself badly gashed.

  Most satirists find themselves indulging in irony sometimes, and I know exactly where I first encountered irony. I was reading Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers for the first time (as a pre-teener) and in chapter two, I encountered Dickens’s description of Tracy Tupman’s zeal at “general benevolence.” Said Dickens, “The number of instances…in which that excellent man referred objects of charity to the houses of other members for left-off garments or pecuniary relief is almost incredible.”

  I was astonished. I thought to myself that it wasn’t very kind of Mr. Tupman to send poor people to other members instead of giving them something himself, so how could he be benevolent? And after a while, the light dawned. He wasn’t benevolent. In fact, I decided indignantly, he was a stingy bum, and my liking for him was strictly limited for the rest of the book and ever since. I did not know that what I had just read was irony, but I understood the concept from that time on, and I eventually learned the word.

  If you want a savage and prolonged bit of writing with a great deal of irony in it, I refer you to Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, which was not published till after he was safely dead. I warn you, though, it’s not pleasant reading. It certainly makes plain, however, Twain’s bitter feelings about humanity and the assorted evils that seemed (to Twain, at any rate) to be inextricably bound up with it. And it may, for a time at least, embitter you with humanity, too.

  Even that, however, must take second place to the all-time high in caustic irony—a pamphlet by Jonathan Swift, published about 1730, entitled “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country and for Making them Beneficial to the Public.” Swift served in Ireland and could see first-hand, and with enormous indignation, the manner in which the English brutally and callously ground the Irish into helpless and hopeless poverty.

  He therefore pointed out that since the only thing the Irish were allowed to produce and keep for their own use were their children, it would supply them with needed money, and others with needed food, if those Irish children were sold in order to be fattened and slaughtered for sale at the butcher’s. With an absolutely straight face, and with incredible ingenuity, he pointed out all the advantages that would accrue from such cannibalism.

  If anything could possibly have evoked shame and even reform from those responsible for the Irish plight, that pamphlet would have done it. Undoubtedly, many of those who read the pamphlet were shamed; some may even have altered their attitudes and behavior. By and large, however, the exploitation of the Irish continued unchanged for nearly two more centuries and the light that casts on humanity is not a good one.

  And yet, you know, not everyone has a “sense of irony,” which is by no means the same as a “sense of humor.” I firmly believe that one can have one and not the other. It is possible to be confused by a pretense to believe the opposite of what you believe, as I was for a few minutes by Dickens’s description of Tupman as benevolent. Of course, I caught on, but if I had lacked a sense of irony, I suppose I wouldn’t have.

  There were, actually, good and kindly people who read Swift’s pamphlet with indignation, not at the mistreatment of the Irish, but at Swift’s apparently callous and immoral advocacy of cannibalism. They thought he meant it, and denounced him with immeasurable vehemence.

  And that finally brings me to Asimov’s for sometimes what we publish contains irony, and if irony is hard to handle even for the absolute master of the art, good old Swift, you can understand that it is a slippery tool for lesser mortals.

  In the February 1984 issue, Tom Rainbow wrote a “Viewpoint” article entitled, “Sentience and the Single Extraterrestrial,” that dealt with the requirements for such things as intelligence, sentience, and self-awareness. He described the kind of extraterrestrials that might, or might not, possess such things.

  From the title alone, you can tell that he is writing in the humorous mode, and indeed, when you read his essay, you will find that he is saying perfectly serious things in a deliberately funny way.

  In one place, he uses irony. Having talked of the requirements of self-awareness in terms of brain/body ratios, he points out that women’s brains are smaller than men’s but so are their bodies, leaving the brain/body ratio nearly the same in both sexes. (Actually, if there’s an advantage it’s on the side of women.) With heavy irony, he says, “this reasoning leads to the somewhat startling conclusion that women must be self-aware.”

  How can one believe that Rainbow really thinks the conclusion is “startling”? He’s using ironic dissimulation. He�
�s pretending to think it’s startling (and italicizing “self-aware” as a typographical indication of astonishment) in order for you to understand thoroughly that this is not startling and that people who consider women inferior beings are ignorant, and even stupid.

  And to make it even plainer, he puts himself in the ironic position of these ignoramuses and says in the next sentence, “Heck, guys, if even girls can be self-aware, then there’s hope for Giant Dill Pickles.”

  The use of the adolescent term “Heck,” and the equally adolescent “guys,” and the shift from “women” to italicized “girls” all show that he is not speaking in his own persona and that he has nothing but contempt for the attitude. He is relying, poor fellow, on his readers having a sense of irony.

  Well, they do—by and large.

  But there are always exceptions, and a few women have written indignant letters to point out that this was insulting. One said that it wasn’t funny or cute.

  No, indeed, Swift’s advocacy of cannibalism wasn’t funny or cute, either, but he was trying for something else.

  To be sure, Swift’s entire pamphlet was aimed at his target and Rainbow was merely bringing in the matter of women’s brains as a side issue, and perhaps if he were doing it again, he might decide it would be more judicious not to indulge. But please, women, the man is on your side and tried to show it by the use of that two-edged sword, irony. You may think the irony didn’t work, but that doesn’t make Rainbow any enemy of womankind.

  Plagiarism

  To the ancient Romans, a “plagiarius” was what we call a kidnapper, and to steal children is certainly a heinous crime. It appears to those who work with their minds and imagination, however, that to steal one’s brainchildren is almost as heinous a crime, and so “plagiarism,” in English, has come to mean the stealing of the ideas, forms, or words by someone who then puts them forth as his or her own.