but taught in universities as something very serious, is James Joyce. He is worse than Gertrude Stein; going all the way to the ultimate in nonobjective writing, he uses words from different languages, makes up some words of his own, and calls that literature.
When communication by means of language is discarded, what is left as the definition of writing? Writing becomes inarticulate sounds printed on paper by means of certain black marks.
No one can be consistently evil. Since evil is destruction, anyone who attempted consistently in his life to follow a bad premise would eliminate himself; he would be dead, or at best insane. A man can hold bad premises only so long as his good ones make them possible, support them—and are destroyed in the process of supporting them. Bad premises, if not eliminated, will grow and destroy the good ones.
I mention this for the following reason. If you are not fully committed to rationality and objectivity, you might not go as far as Stein and Joyce, but your writing will then be a combination of the rational and the irrational. You will not, say, write a book without any knowledge of its meaning; you know in general what you want to communicate, you stick to rationality in a loose way, and you write something that has the semblance of a story. But in selecting the details of that story—the characters, events, and sentences—you rely only on feelings and unidentified premises. These premises might be right or wrong; that which you do not know consciously is not in your control. If questioned, you say: “I know my general theme, but not why I wrote this particular sentence this way. I just felt like it.”
This means that you will be a cross between a writer like me and a writer like Gertrude Stein.
Insofar as the rational elements predominate in your writing, you might “get away with” the flaws in your performance. But you should not want to be a part-rational, part-Gertrude Stein writer.
Do not let your own talent—your good premises—act in support of your bad premises and of the lazy or the irrational in your mind.
If to any extent you hold the premise of nonobjectivity, then by your own choice, you do not belong in literature, or in any human activity, or on this earth.
With the exception of proper names, every word is an abstraction. One way to have words come to you easily—words which express the exact shade of meaning you want—is to know clearly the concretes that belong under your abstractions.
For instance, the word table is an abstraction; it stands for any table you have ever seen or will see. If you try to project what you mean by “table,” you can easily visualize any number of concrete examples. But in regard to abstractions like individualism, freedom, or rationality, most people are unable to name a single concrete. Even knowing one or two is not enough. In order to be completely free with words, you must know countless concretes under your abstractions.
The issue of the relationship of abstractions to concretes is crucial to all creative writing—not only to the composition of a sentence, but to the composition of a whole story and of its every chapter and paragraph.
When you compose a story, you start with an abstraction, then find the concretes which add up to that abstraction. For the reader, the process is reversed: he first perceives the concretes you present and then adds them up to the abstraction with which you started. I call this a “circle.”
For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is “the importance of reason”—a wide abstraction. To leave the reader with that message, I have to show what reason is, how it operates, and why it is important. The sequence on the construction of the John Galt Line is included for that purpose—to concretize the mind’s role in human life. The rest of the novel illustrates the consequences of the mind’s absence. In particular, the chapter on the tunnel catastrophe shows concretely what happens to a world where men do not dare to think or to take the responsibility of judgment. If, at the end of the novel, you are left with the impression “Yes, the mind is important and we should live by reason,” these incidents are the cause. The concretes have summed up in your mind to the abstraction with which I started, and which I had to break down into concretes.
Every chapter and paragraph of Atlas Shrugged is set up