"Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry"
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Golding strips the novelist of the romantic alibi. No more misty talk of inspiration fluttering down like birdsong; he yanks writing back to earth, where it belongs, among calluses and schedules. The move is strategic: by opening with nature imagery, he summons the very myth he’s about to puncture. Birds sing because they must. Novelists, he insists, write because they choose to take on a trade, and trades come with repetition, boredom, and craftsmanship that can’t be outsourced to mood.
The carpentry comparison is doing more than “making it relatable.” Carpentry implies measurement, joints that either hold or don’t, and the humiliating fact that a finished object is judged by function as much as beauty. In other words: a novel isn’t a diary with better lighting. It’s an engineered experience. Golding’s subtext is a quiet rebuke to readers who treat fiction as effortless self-expression and to writers who perform helplessness in the face of the blank page. Routine isn’t the enemy of art; it’s the mechanism that makes art possible.
Context matters: Golding wrote novels preoccupied with the thin varnish of civilization and the structure underneath it. Here, he applies the same suspicion to the writer’s own mythology. He’s defending the dignity of labor while smuggling in a harsher truth: if the work is daily, then so is responsibility. You don’t get to blame nature when the story collapses.
The carpentry comparison is doing more than “making it relatable.” Carpentry implies measurement, joints that either hold or don’t, and the humiliating fact that a finished object is judged by function as much as beauty. In other words: a novel isn’t a diary with better lighting. It’s an engineered experience. Golding’s subtext is a quiet rebuke to readers who treat fiction as effortless self-expression and to writers who perform helplessness in the face of the blank page. Routine isn’t the enemy of art; it’s the mechanism that makes art possible.
Context matters: Golding wrote novels preoccupied with the thin varnish of civilization and the structure underneath it. Here, he applies the same suspicion to the writer’s own mythology. He’s defending the dignity of labor while smuggling in a harsher truth: if the work is daily, then so is responsibility. You don’t get to blame nature when the story collapses.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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