Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
By Maria Popova
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance to learn from one of the world’s greatest storytellers.
After a decade as a struggling obscure writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) — brilliant, strange, so frail and tubercular he was always on the brink of death — had just been catapulted into global fame by Treasure Island, published a year earlier. With her mother’s help, Adelaide procured an introduction to the author and his fierce wife Fanny. By the perfect balance of audacity, veneration, and kindness, she was eventually welcomed into the “enchanted palace” of the couple’s world — first as their affectionately nicknamed “game-keeper” (for looking after their menagerie of stray cats and pigeons), then as Stevenson’s scribe (the typewriter was still a clunky novelty), and eventually, to her disbelieving exhilaration, as his pupil.
Thirty-seven years later, with Stevenson long gone, she set down her memories of life at Skerryvore — the name the Stevensons had given their home, after a lighthouse built by the author’s uncle on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland — in the slender, utterly delightful 1926 gem R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, Flashlights from Skerryvore (public library | public domain). Punctuating her loving recollections is a series of invaluable writing lessons from one of the greatest storytellers our civilization has produced.
Clad in his velvet coat and dark red tie, wrapped in a Kashmir shawl, perched on the edge of a suitcase, Stevenson would give the young woman assignments, then listen to her read them out loud and, with amicable brutality, offer his suggestions for improvement. In an era when women comprised less than 1% of published authors, often writing under initials or pseudonyms to guard from bias, Stevenson — a fierce feminist by the standards of his era, and even by the standards of ours — believed that women were not any lesser at writing than men, but that their writing suffered because they were too proud to edit, to accept any “suggestion at amendment,” to concede that the first attempt is rarely the best one can do. (Let us not be too proud to admit that he might be somewhat right.) His greatest gift to his young pupil was the humility and discipline of editing. She recounts:
Though as a critic absolutely merciless, nobody in the world rewarded more lavishly or with keener pleasure what he called “a good, honest piece of work.”
Her initiation into the craft began with listening — she would sit in on Stevenson reading his drafts of what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Fanny — his lifelong collaborator, editor, and caretaker, who carried her perennially sickly husband (“just an animated bundle of shawls and wraps, with long, thin hair and burning eyes,” Adelaide remembers) up and down the stairs between his bedroom and the Blue Room where he wrote. Fanny would in turn offer her own merciless feedback as Adelaide absorbed every word.
Eventually, Stevenson began giving her direct instruction. Because all originality begins in imitation, and because creativity is crippled without craftsmanship, he first tasked her with reading some of her favorite authors and attempting short pieces of writing in each of their style. To then discover her own voice, he assigned her a short description of something she loved, giving her a tight word count and a day to finish. She chose her garden. Despite her vivid feeling for its “unique charm,” attempt after attempt at a written description “ended in a passion of despair.” She stayed up all night until, by sunrise, she had arrived at a version to her satisfaction, even edged with pride. But when she presented it to Stevenson, he tore it apart. After doing some math on the language, dividing the word count by the word parts, he indicted her prose for containing a staggering 17% adjectives — “and mostly weak ones at that!” — then exhorted her to always choose descriptive verbs over them:
If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about ‘climbing roses’ or ‘green, mossy lawns.’ Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about ‘green grass.’ Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others.
He then instructed her to read with a sensitive ear and listen for the one word that breaks “the rhythm of a sentence otherwise neatly balanced.” One well chosen word, he taught her, can “send the breath of life through a paralysed sentence,” can serve as a “landmark” amid “a featureless desert of words” to help the writer “get back home to the heart of things.”
Looking back on her experience, Adelaide synthesizes some of his most invaluable guardrails against bad writing:
- Keep it tight to keep it strong: “Never let a long sentence get out of hand. If it begins to run loose, tie it in a knot with a good strong inversion: swing it round on a pivot.”
- Don’t describe things by what they are not: “Never state a thing backwards.”
- Become a tuning fork for meaning: “Read every sentence aloud to yourself. If the sense is not limpidly clear, make it so before you pass on. If needs be, write it over and over again, but nothing with which your own ear is dissatisfied must ever be allowed to stand.”
- Use good language even when relaying bad speech: When recreating dialogue in writing, “never let the vulgar craze for realistic writing run away with you”: paraphrase “commonplace talk” in a way that remains “true to the spirit of a speaker” but elevates the style.
But perhaps the most potent advice on writing — that which emboldened Adelaide to actually become an author — came from Fanny Stevenson. When Adelaide first confided in her that she had been “only trying” at writing for years but often felt “hopeless,” Fanny took a long silence, then offered:
Whatever you have honestly tried to do well was worth doing. It always is.
Complement with other abiding wisdom on writing from Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Octavia Butler, and Mary Oliver, then revisit Stevenson on what makes life worth living.
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