Prince and Dickens

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. The recording artist Prince was astonishingly prolific.

By the time he died in 2016, he’d already recorded enough songs to release a new album every six months for the next 40 years. And you know who else was astonishingly prolific? Charles Dickens. Amazingly, he was usually writing more than one novel at a time, and ultimately he wrote some four million words. The British novelist Nick Hornby has written a book that links those two. It’s called Dickens and Prince, A Particular Kind of Genius. And Grant, this book reads a little bit like those compare and contrast essays that you might have been assigned in college. And there are some intriguing parallels. Both men were born into poverty. Both of them died before the age of 59. And during their short lives, the creativity just poured out of them. It was unstoppable. So the book actually ends up being a meditation on creativity itself. Where does creativity come from? How do you nurture it? How do you care for it? And the other thing that this book has made me do is to re-examine my own relationship with perfectionism when it comes to writing. Because I’ve always valued polishing a piece of writing word by word, sentence by sentence, but this book really makes you think about how much polishing is actually worth it. When does a piece of writing get to the point where you should just stop and let it go? How much better does work end up if you spend another hour or another day or another week on it? And I have to admit, it’s made me question, when does polishing become procrastinating?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I love this. It reminds me of the talks that I would have with interns when I was a lexicographer. I would talk to them in the first week about the difference between perfection and good enough. Exactly what you were talking about. And how perfection was the enemy of a lexicographer because we did not have the time, did not have the resources. There was no perfect. You would never finish looking up the history of a word. You simply had to be satisfied that you had approached the ultimate answer. You had approached the perfect definition. You had approached the truth. You had approached enough. And then you had to leave it because there was so much, there was an infinite amount of work to do. Yes, and deadlines. Prince I know somewhat more about than Dickens, and I think what I’ve learned about Prince outside of reading the article in Esquire that was an interview with Nick Hornby about this book is that was Prince’s thing. He had to be satisfied with good enough because he had that infinite amount of creativity. He had to go on to the next thing because there was so much more he wanted to do. And perfectionism gets in the way of the next thing. If perfectionism is an excuse for you to allow your fear of failure to get in the way, then you’ve got a problem. So a lot of times perfection is an excuse not to put your work out there. And then when we look at Dickens, and Dickens, you know, he had his critics. Sure. But he knew what his audience wanted. And so when he would serialize his work and put it out there in the newspapers, people would poo-poo that. And that was why he worked on multiple books at a time is because he was trying to sell it. He was trying to get it out there in multiple markets in multiple ways. Right. I love the idea of this book, and I’m im encouraged that you immediately thought about this and the idea of writing and language and literature. And I’m looking forward to hearing other people’s thoughts on it.

What is it again?

It’s called Dickens and Prince, A Particular Kind of Genius, and it’s by Nick Hornby.

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