Robert Louis Stevenson on writing: lose the 'twaddling detail'

A newly published essay by Stevenson, written around 1881, is full of advice, with references to Shakespeare for true 'sensation'

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 March 2013

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

I loved Elmore Leonard's – and many other novelists' – tips on writing a few years back, so I'm delighted to see that a recently discovered essay by none other than Robert Louis Stevenson provides yet more useful advice for the authors of today: leave out the excruciating detail.

"Suppose you were to be asked to write a complete account of a day at school. You would probably begin by saying you rose at a certain hour, dressed and came down to morning school. You would not think of telling how many buttons you had to fasten, nor how long you took to make a parting, nor how many steps you descended," Stevenson writes in the essay, published for the first time in the American magazine the Strand last week. "The youngest boy would have too much of what we call 'literary tact' to do that. Such a quantity of twaddling detail would simply bore the reader's head off."

The Strand's managing editor Andrew Gulli tells the Associated Press that the essay is believed to date from around 1881, when Stevenson was in his early 30s and working on Treasure Island. The novelist also has some choice words for his fellow authors. "In the trash that I have no doubt you generally read, a vast number of people will probably get shot and stabbed and drowned; and you have only a very slight excitement for your money," he wrote. "But if you want to know what a murder really is – to have a murder brought right home to you – you must read of one in the writings of a great writer. Read Macbeth, for example, or still better, get someone to read it aloud to you; and I think I can promise you what people call a 'sensation'."

For yet more sensation, how about a murder in Treasure Island itself, when Long John Silver breaks a man's back with his crutch and then "next moment … had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body"?

"When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head," Jim tells us. "Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a wisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly on the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had been actually done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since before my eyes."

Writers, says Stevenson, leave "all the dullness out". Or at least they should. 

My memories of reading Treasure Island as a child – fingernails totally bitten down, terror of the "black spot" – suggest he took his own advice. I'm feeling a re-read of young Jim's adventures is long overdue.