W. H. Auden: Writers Should “Talk Their Own Language”

According to the Writer’s Almanac, Tuesday was the birthday of:

 American short-story author Grace Paley. She grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx, where she was surrounded by a wide variety of languages. Her own parents spoke Yiddish and Russian at home, and English in public. She loved to hear the different tongues, and especially loved listening to all the gossip, but when she first started writing poetry, she wrote in a formal, stilted British style because she thought that’s what poems were supposed to sound like. Then, in college, she met W.H. Auden and he agreed to read her work. She later recalled: “We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, ‘Do you really talk like that?’ And I kept saying, ‘Oh yeah, well, sometimes.’ That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you’d better talk your own language.”

I do enough writing that I tend to notice comments like this, and take what I can from them.  Auden’s advice seems spot on to me.  In fact, when I’m helping my kids with their writing assignments in school and they are having trouble getting started, I often ask them to look at me and tell me about the subject at hand.  Then I say, “Excellent.  Write that down.”