会见散文家E.B. White并考虑他在写作和写作过程中提供的建议。朋友和家人都知道安迪，他在缅因州北布鲁克林一座俯瞰大海的白色老农舍里度过了他生命的最后50年。他在那里写了大部分最著名的文章、三本儿童读物和一本畅销的文体指南。

e.b.怀特简介

自从1985年E.B.怀特在那座农舍去世以来，整整一代人都在成长，但他狡猾、自嘲的声音比以往任何时候都更有力。近年来，索尼影业将斯图尔特·利特尔（Stuart Little）变成了一家特许经营公司，并于2006年发布了第二部改编自夏洛特网络的电影。更重要的是，怀特的小说《一头猪》和一只蜘蛛是“一个真正的朋友和一个好作家”，在过去的半个世纪里售出了5000多万册。

然而，与大多数儿童读物的作者不同，E.B.怀特不是一个一旦我们从童年时代溜走就可以被抛弃的作家。20世纪30年代、40年代和50年代，他最早在《哈珀》、《纽约客》和《大西洋》中发表的那些随意而雄辩的文章，已经在E.B.怀特的文章中重印（哈珀·多年生，1999年）。例如，在《猪之死》中，我们可以欣赏这个故事的成人版，这个故事最终形成了夏洛特的网络。在《再到湖边去》中，怀特将最老套的散文主题——“我是如何度过暑假的”——转变成了对死亡的惊人沉思。

对于有志于提高自己写作水平的读者，怀特提供了《风格元素》（企鹅出版社，2005）——康奈尔大学教授威廉·斯特伦克（William Strunk，Jr.）于1918年首次编写的《谦逊指南》的生动修订本。该书出现在我们的作家必备参考书短名单中。

怀特获得了美国艺术与文学学院散文和评论金奖、劳拉·英格尔·怀尔德奖、国家文学奖和总统自由勋章。1973年，他被选入美国艺术与文学学院。

e、 怀特给一位年轻作家的建议

当你17岁的时候，你会做什么？当你被生活所困扰，并且确信你的梦想是成为一名职业作家的时候？如果你在35年前是“R小姐”，你会写一封信给你最喜欢的作家，征求他的意见。35年前，你会收到E.B.怀特的回复：

Dear Miss R: At seventeen, the future is apt to seem formidable, even depressing. You should see the pages of my journal circa 1916. You asked me about writing—how I did it. There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed. I must have written half a million words (mostly in my journal) before I had anything published, save for a couple of short items in St. Nicholas. If you want to write about feelings, about the end of summer, about growing, write about it. A great deal of writing is not "plotted"—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind. You ask, "Who cares?" Everybody cares. You say, "It's been written before." Everything has been written before. I went to college but not direct from high school; there was an interval of six or eight months. Sometimes it works out well to take a short vacation from the academic world—I have a grandson who took a year off and got a job in Aspen, Colorado. After a year of skiing and working, he is now settled into Colby College as a freshman. But I can't advise you, or won't advise you, on any such decision. If you have a counselor at school, I'd seek the counselor's advice. In college (Cornell), I got on the daily newspaper and ended up as editor of it. It enabled me to do a lot of writing and gave me a good journalistic experience. You are right that a person's real duty in life is to save his dream, but don't worry about it and don't let them scare you. Henry Thoreau, who wrote Walden, said, "I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." The sentence, after more than a hundred years, is still alive. So, advance confidently. And when you write something, send it (neatly typed) to a magazine or a publishing house. Not all magazines read unsolicited contributions, but some do. The New Yorker is always looking for new talent. Write a short piece for them, send it to The Editor. That's what I did forty-some years ago. Good luck. Sincerely, E. B. White

无论你是像“R小姐”这样的年轻作家还是年长的作家，怀特的建议仍然有效。自信地前进，祝你好运。

e、 b.怀特：作家的责任

在1969年《巴黎评论》的一次采访中，怀特被要求表达他“对作者致力于政治、国际事务的看法”。他的回答是：

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

e、 b.为普通读者写作的白种人

在一篇题为“计算机器”的文章中，怀特轻蔑地写道“阅读简易计算器”，一种用来衡量个人写作风格“可读性”的装置。

There is, of course, no such thing as reading ease of written matter. There is the ease with which matter can be read, but that is a condition of the reader, not of the matter. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following the calculating machine downstairs is not ascending—if you will pardon the expression—and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer. The movies long ago decided that a wider communication could be achieved by a deliberate descent to a lower level, and they walked proudly down until they reached the cellar. Now they are groping for the light switch, hoping to find the way out.

e、 b.白纸书写风格

在《风格要素》的最后一章（Allyn&amp；Bacon，1999），怀特提出了21条“建议和警示提示”，以帮助作家发展有效的风格。他在这些提示的前面加了一句警告：

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style—all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity. Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience; he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge.

你会注意到，在提倡朴素和简单风格的同时，怀特通过巧妙的隐喻传达了他的思想。

e、 怀特教授语法

尽管风格元素具有规定性的基调，怀特自己对语法和句法的运用基本上是直观的，正如他在《纽约客》中所解释的：

Usage seems to us peculiarly a matter of ear. Everyone has his own prejudices, his own set of rules, his own list of horribles. The English language is always sticking a foot out to trip a man. Every week we get thrown, writing merrily along. English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education—sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across a street.

e、 b.不写字的白色

在一篇题为《工作中的作家》的书评中，怀特描述了他自己的写作习惯，或者更确切地说，他推迟写作的习惯。

The thought of writing hangs over our mind like an ugly cloud, making us apprehensive and depressed, as before a summer storm, so that we begin the day by subsiding after breakfast, or by going away, often to seedy and inconclusive destinations: the nearest zoo, or a branch post office to buy a few stamped envelopes. Our professional life has been a long shameless exercise in avoidance. Our home is designed for the maximum of interruption, our office is the place where we never are. Yet the record is there. Not even lying down and closing the blinds stops us from writing; not even our family, and our preoccupation with same, stops us.