The Red Pen We All Carry

Evan Swensen
June 2, 2025

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” — H.G. Wells

Writers know the truth of those words deep in their bones. There’s something about a messy paragraph or a half-formed idea—written by someone else—that draws the eye, twitches the fingers, and tempts the critic. H.G. Wells, never one to tiptoe around human impulses, nailed it. Behind the humor in that statement lies something sharp and enduring: the strange pleasure found not in creation, but correction. The urge to fix, to refine, to leave your mark—especially on work that isn’t yours.

Wells lived in a world of drafts—newspapers, serialized stories, treatises for peace. He understood the tangled pride and peril that come with the written word. But he also knew when to step back and let the original voice stand.

A Sickbed, a Library, and a Future Author

Before he ever walked among presidents or imagined Martians landing in Surrey, Wells was just a sickly boy from a struggling English household. One fall from a rooftop landed him in bed for weeks, wrapped in boredom and blankets. It could have been misery. Instead, it became his classroom.

Books poured into that small space like sunlight through curtains—Dickens, Swift, Arabian tales. The boundaries of his world stretched beyond illness, beyond class, beyond the soot-dark town where he was born. He didn’t just fall into reading. He found refuge in it.

Years later, when he took classes under T.H. Huxley—Darwin’s bulldog—science gave his ideas form. Evolution, social order, human potential… these weren’t just theories to Wells. They were questions he’d been asking since the fevered days of boyhood. Writing gave him a place to answer.

The Writer and the Statesman

By the time Wells sat across from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, he was no longer a bedridden boy or an obscure teacher. He was a writer with global reach—equal parts storyteller and social architect.

Their conversation, though brief, was revealing. Roosevelt, deep in New Deal reforms, spoke of hope, progress, and recovery. Wells listened closely. Here was someone turning ideas into policy, ideals into action. For a man who had imagined future worlds in A Modern Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come, this meeting confirmed a belief he held for decades: the written word could guide real power.

Wells left the White House with more than a good story. He left affirmed. What had started in cheap boarding rooms with ink-stained fingers had reached the heart of democracy itself.

When Fiction Tells the Truth

Wells didn’t hide his convictions behind fiction. He used it to confront readers. The War of the Worlds reversed the lens of imperialism, placing comfortable Britons in the path of a superior force. The Island of Doctor Moreau raised ethical alarms about science gone wild. The Invisible Man warned of unchecked isolation and moral decay.

He wasn’t writing escapism. He was writing warnings.

Outside his novels, Wells pushed for a fairer world. He spoke of education as a right, not a privilege. He challenged narrow thinking and imagined a global society built on reason rather than war. Years before the United Nations existed, Wells called for one in print.

Some laughed. Others listened. But none could ignore him.

The Legacy in the Margins

What makes Wells remarkable isn’t just his fiction. It’s his refusal to separate art from action. He wrote with urgency. He wrote with purpose. And he kept writing long after critics called him outdated or idealistic.

Still, his most piercing observation might be that offhand comment about editing. Every writer knows how hard it is to create something original. How easy it is to critique. How tempting it is to rewrite.

But Wells reminds us—whether in critique or creation—the goal remains the same: clarity, courage, change.

Pick Up the Pen

If H.G. Wells could shape modern thought from a rented room, with lungs half-full of coal dust and shoes worn through, then we can too. Read The Time Machine. Revisit The War of the Worlds. Study The Invisible Man. Then write.

Not perfectly. Not safely. But honestly.

Let the world meet your draft before you polish someone else’s. Because the future belongs not to those who correct—but to those who dare to speak.

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