Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining a high standard in writing, appealing to the most discerning readers rather than oversimplifying for the masses.
Martin Amis suggests that writers should aim to challenge and engage their most intelligent and discerning audience instead of diluting their message to cater to a broader but less engaged readership. By focusing on the top five percent of readers who appreciate depth and complexity, writers can create richer and more meaningful content that resonates with those who truly value literature and critical thinking.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a mentor might use this quote to inspire students to elevate their writing style.
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
You can't just declare that you have a growth mindset. Growth mindset is hard.
We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
Treat your audience like poets and geniuses and theyβll have the chance to become them.
For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
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