Poet, critic, and translator Ezra Pound has a lot to teach us about writing. Best known for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” that freshman lit staple, Pound also gave us a slew of smart, insightful essays on the craft of writing. It was Pound who wrote,
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is over little worth.
Embracing discovery in your writing will ensure that your reader enjoys a sense of discovery too.
Pound also had some thoughts on the over-use of meaningless adjectives:
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Read more of what Pound had to say about writing and the writing life around the web:
Over at the wonderfully erudite and always-fascinating blog Brain Pickings, Maria Popova rounds up Ezra Pound’s List of 6 Types of Writers
The Poetry Foundation has this terrific essay by Pound, “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts”
The Paris Review published Donald Hall’s interview with Ezra Pound.
I don’t know about method. The what is so much more important than how.