"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish"
About this Quote
Stevenson strips the romance off authorship and leaves the actual bruising work: control. Plenty of people can put sentences on a page; fewer can translate a private, slippery intention into public language without it warping on contact with the reader. His first pivot, "not to write, but to write what you mean", targets the most common literary self-deception: mistaking fluency for clarity. Words arrive easily, meaning doesn’t. The mind supplies connections the page never earned.
Then he tightens the screw: the goal isn’t to "affect your reader" in the generic sense, but to affect him precisely as you wish. That adverb is the tell. Stevenson isn’t arguing for emotional blunt force; he’s arguing for calibrated impact, the kind that requires restraint, selection, and a near-architectural sense of cause and effect. The subtext is slightly cynical: readers will be moved regardless, but often by the wrong thing. Sentimentality, ambiguity, accidental comedy, unintended melodrama - these are failures of aim, not failures of effort.
Context matters. Stevenson wrote in a late-Victorian literary marketplace where prose was expected to both entertain and instruct, and where style could curdle into mannerism. His own adventure narratives are famously readable, but never sloppy; he understood that "ease" is a crafted illusion. The line doubles as a quiet defense of craftsmanship over inspiration: literature is less a confession than a piece of engineering, built to produce a specific charge in a stranger’s nervous system.
Then he tightens the screw: the goal isn’t to "affect your reader" in the generic sense, but to affect him precisely as you wish. That adverb is the tell. Stevenson isn’t arguing for emotional blunt force; he’s arguing for calibrated impact, the kind that requires restraint, selection, and a near-architectural sense of cause and effect. The subtext is slightly cynical: readers will be moved regardless, but often by the wrong thing. Sentimentality, ambiguity, accidental comedy, unintended melodrama - these are failures of aim, not failures of effort.
Context matters. Stevenson wrote in a late-Victorian literary marketplace where prose was expected to both entertain and instruct, and where style could curdle into mannerism. His own adventure narratives are famously readable, but never sloppy; he understood that "ease" is a crafted illusion. The line doubles as a quiet defense of craftsmanship over inspiration: literature is less a confession than a piece of engineering, built to produce a specific charge in a stranger’s nervous system.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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