Maugham on Writing: Know Your Limitations

British novelist William Somerset Maugham attributed his success to an ability to accept his inadequacies as a writer. Once he had done that, Maugham observed in his autobiography, he could focus on cultivating his strengths:

I discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what excellence I could within them. I knew that I had no lyrical quality, I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge it much, availed me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to me. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were beyond my powers. . . . I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me.

On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the richness and strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sounds. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I assigned to them.
(The Summing Up, 1938)

A student of medicine before he turned to writing, Maugham was able to offer a sound diagnosis of his creative weaknesses and strengths. He recognized that he was not a first-rate author (though he did believe that he stood "in the very first row of the second-raters"). His style was plain; his insights were rarely profound. Yet in clear, economical prose, he could accurately describe the small details of the everyday world. "Most people cannot see anything," he once said, "but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating."

It's the rare writer who excels at all aspects of the craft. There are masterful stylists who, at bottom, have remarkably little to say. And there are vigorous thinkers whose sentences plod along like the lumbering steps of a draft horse.

Becoming a better writer means building on your strengths. But it also means confronting your limitations--identifying those qualities that stubbornly resist all your efforts to improve them. For more advice on coming to terms with your abilities and ambitions as a writer, please see Your Role As a Writer.More Writers on Writing:

• Writers on Writing: E.B. White
• Virginia Woolf on Keeping a Journal
• Norman Mailer on Writers and Writing

Image: William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)