Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/212

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS found to work well, both in my own case and in that of other writers of my acquaintance, is to thresh out a difficult episode or problem in conversation, talking the whole thing over, sometimes with several people in succession, and thus gradually clarifying the underlying thought and crystallising the form of its expression. It often happens that some phrase or expression which has baffled and eluded us for days in the privacy of our study suddenly flashes into definite shape in the heat of a discussion; or the one tantalising word that a phrase lacked to clinch the meaning beyond question leaps to the tip of the speaker's tongue when it had persistently refused to come at the call of the pen. And after all is not this a perfectly natural and easily understood consequence of the way in which the whole art of literary composition must have developed? Authorship antedates by unmeasured centuries the discovery of letters [198]