our thoughts;
we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we
cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass
through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred
notions, all more or less bearing on the central thought, but the
movements of which they cannot wholly control. Their thoughts are like
a turbulent crowd, and one's business is to drill them into an ordered
regiment. A writer has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and
the cure for this natural vagueness is to choose small precise
subjects, to say all that we have in our minds about them, and to stop
when we have finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness
and clearness.

I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own
belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I believe
that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant practice; we
must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty manuscripts altogether;
we ought not to fret over them and rewrite them. The two things that I
have found to be of infinite service to myself, in learning to write
prose, have been keeping a full diary, and writing poetry. The habit of
diarizing is easily acquired, and as soon as it becomes habitual, the
day is no more complete without it than it is complete without a cold
bath and regular meals. People say that they have not time to keep a
diary; but they would never say that they had not time to take a bath
or to have their meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's
movements; it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some
particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice
which brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful
thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten
years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's
earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has the
immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready to hand;
and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and frank
expression.

And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain
years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when
poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self-expression.
This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry need not be very
good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the merits of my