Daily Inspiration Quote by James Payn

Better to get sued than to write like a coward. James Payn is defending the novelist's oldest dirty trick: borrowing from life so closely that the living start to recognize themselves, then pretending innocence. His target is the fussy, self-protective convention of printing "Mr. B----" or sprinkling asterisks across a name, a Victorian fig leaf that both invites identification and denies responsibility. Payn sees that move as doubly "melancholy": aesthetically ugly and morally evasive.

The intent is practical as much as principled. Payn is arguing for clean prose and narrative authority. Blanks and asterisks yank the reader out of the story, turning fiction into a courtroom document. They also create a wink-wink intimacy with the audience: you, clever reader, can guess who I mean. Payn calls that out as reputation-damaging precisely because it signals fear. If you're going to put a real person on the page, do it openly, with enough craft - and enough disguise - that the work stands as fiction rather than gossip with typographical camouflage.

Under the subtext is a bracing view of authorship: the writer's job is not to be nice, or even safe, but to be lucid and unsentimental about the costs of observation. "Unfortunate coincidences" is a sly euphemism for the scandal every novelist courts: the collision between art and social consequence. In an era when libel law and social standing could throttle a career, Payn is staking out a professional ethic: risk the legal friction, avoid the literary embarrassment.