Pho­to by Faizul Latif Chowd­hury, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

As even his harsh­est crit­ics admit­ted, V.S. Naipaul knew how to write. The death ear­li­er this month of the author of A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the Riv­er, and The Enig­ma of Arrival got read­ers think­ing again about the nature of his art. A Trinidad-born Indi­an who went to Eng­land on a gov­ern­ment schol­ar­ship to Oxford, he even­tu­al­ly achieved a lit­er­ary mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage that few of his peers in Eng­land — or any­one else there, for that mat­ter — could hope to match.

Like any cel­e­brat­ed cre­ator, Naipaul has long had his imi­ta­tors. But instead of try­ing to repli­cate what they read in his books, they would do bet­ter to repli­cate how he made him­self a writer. “It took a lot of work to do it,” Naipaul once told an inter­view­er. “In the begin­ning I had to for­get every­thing I had writ­ten by the age of 22. I aban­doned every­thing and began to write like a child at school. Almost writ­ing ‘the cat sat on the mat.’” Ami­ta­va Kumar quotes that line in an essay on his own devel­op­ment as a writer, influ­enced not just by Naipaul’s mem­o­ries of start­ing out but Naipaul’s sev­en rules.

“There was a pen-and-ink por­trait of Naipaul on the wall,” writes Kumar about his first day work­ing at the Indi­an news­pa­per Tehel­ka. “High above someone’s com­put­er was a sheet of paper that said ‘V. S. Naipaul’s Rules for Begin­ners.’ ” Tehel­ka reporters had asked the famed writer “if he could give them some basic sug­ges­tions for improv­ing their lan­guage. Naipaul had come up with some rules. He had fussed over their for­mu­la­tion, cor­rect­ed them, and then faxed back the cor­rec­tions.” Kumar decid­ed to fol­low the rules and found they were “a won­der­ful anti­dote to my prac­tice of using aca­d­e­m­ic jar­gon, and they made me con­scious of my own writ­ing habits. I was dis­cov­er­ing lan­guage as if it were a new coun­try.”

Naipaul’s list of rules for begin­ning writ­ers runs as fol­lows:

Do not write long sen­tences. A sen­tence should not have more than 10 or 12 words.

Each sen­tence should make a clear state­ment. It should add to the state­ment that went before. A good para­graph is a series of clear, linked state­ments.

Do not use big words. If your com­put­er tells you that your aver­age word is more than five let­ters long, there is some­thing wrong. The use of small words com­pels you to think about what you are writ­ing. Even dif­fi­cult ideas can be bro­ken down into small words.

Nev­er use words whose mean­ings you are not sure of. If you break this rule you should look for oth­er work.

The begin­ner should avoid using adjec­tives, except those of col­or, size and num­ber. Use as few adverbs as pos­si­ble.

If you’ve read oth­er writ­ers’ tips, espe­cial­ly those we’ve fea­tured before here on Open Cul­ture, some of Naipaul’s rules may sound famil­iar. “Nev­er use a long word where a short one will do,” says George Orwell. “The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es,” says Niet­zsche. “The adverb is not your friend,” says Stephen King. Naipaul’s rules may strike you as over­ly restric­tive, but bear in mind that he com­posed them for news­pa­per­men look­ing to make improve­ments in their prose, and rec­om­mend­ed fol­low­ing them for six months as a kind of course of treat­ment to rid them­selves of “bad lan­guage habits.”

The sea­soned writer, how­ev­er, can work accord­ing to rules of his own. Naipaul once explained this in no uncer­tain terms to Knopf edi­tor-in-chief Son­ny Mehta. “It hap­pens that Eng­lish — the his­to­ry of the lan­guage — was my sub­ject at Oxford,” he wrote in a let­ter rep­ri­mand­ing the house for its overzeal­ous copy edit­ing, labo­ri­ous­ly adher­ent to French-style “court rules,” of one of his man­u­scripts. “The glo­ry of Eng­lish is that it is with­out these court rules: it is a lan­guage made by the peo­ple who write it. My name goes on my book. I am respon­si­ble for the way the words are put togeth­er. It is one rea­son why I became a writer.”

via Lithub

Relat­ed con­tent:

V.S. Naipaul Writes an Enraged Let­ter to His Pub­lish­er After a Copy-Edi­tor Revis­es His Book, A Turn in the South

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writ­ing Clear and Tight Prose

Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writ­ing with Style (1882)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Pho­to by Faizul Latif Chowd­hury, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There are many ways for trav­el writ­ers to get their sub­ject bad­ly wrong. Per­haps the worst is sole­ly rely­ing on unin­formed obser­va­tion rather than seek­ing the wis­dom and expe­ri­ence of knowl­edge­able locals. To his cred­it, cel­e­brat­ed Nobel prize-win­ning nov­el­ist V.S. Naipaul—who passed away on August 11th at age 85—met, min­gled, and spoke freely with indi­vid­u­als from every walk of life (includ­ing Eudo­ra Wel­ty) in the process of writ­ing A Turn in the South, a trav­el­ogue of his sojourn through the much-mythol­o­gized and maligned South­ern states of the U.S.

Naipaul’s voice alone might have over­whelmed the work with the extreme­ly harsh, some have said big­ot­ed, judg­ments he became known for in nov­els like A Bend in the Riv­er, Gueril­las, and The Enig­ma of Arrival. Instead, he won praise from review­ers like South­ern his­to­ri­an C. Vann Wood­ward, who wrote that Naipaul “brings new under­stand­ing of the sub­ject to his read­er.” Wood­ward also not­ed that Naipaul “con­fess­es to ‘writ­ing anx­i­eties’ about under­tak­ing this book on peo­ple unknown to him.”

Though he con­sult­ed and quot­ed local voic­es in his sur­vey of the South, it is ulti­mate­ly Naipaul’s voice that orga­nizes the work, and his pre­cise, eru­dite prose the read­er hears. It was a voice he took great pride in, as he should. For his many faults, Naipaul was a mas­ter­ful lit­er­ary styl­ist. One won­ders, then, why a copy edi­tor at Knopf would feel it nec­es­sary to make exten­sive revi­sions to the man­u­script of A Turn in the South before its pub­li­ca­tion.

Copy-edit­ing is an essen­tial func­tion, writes Let­ters of Note, with­out which many books would go to print “pep­pered with redun­dant hyphens, need­less rep­e­ti­tion, mis­placed semi­colons,” etc. But it is also a task that should inter­fere as lit­tle as pos­si­ble with the mat­ters of dic­tion, style, and syn­tax that char­ac­ter­ize an autho­r­i­al voice. Like a con­sci­en­tious back­pack­er, a good copy edi­tor should endeav­or to leave almost no trace unless the text is full of seri­ous prob­lems.

Clear­ly, as Naipaul’s irri­tat­ed let­ter below shows, some­thing went wrong. Upon receiv­ing the copy-edit­ed text, he writes, he was oblig­ed to restore the orig­i­nal from mem­o­ry. Naipaul assures Knopf’s edi­tor-in-chief Son­ny Mehta that he under­stands the Eng­lish lan­guage and its his­to­ry very well, and knows that, unlike French, it has no “court rules,” and can be bent any num­ber of ways with­out break­ing. He implies it is the job of every “seri­ous or ded­i­cat­ed” writer in Eng­lish to use the lan­guage as they see fit, and the job of an edi­tor to most­ly get out of the way.

No doubt this rela­tion­ship can prove com­pli­cat­ed and frus­trat­ing for both par­ties. Still, though we only get Naipaul’s side of the sto­ry, it’s hard not to take it when he points out he had writ­ten 20 books by that time, all of them acclaimed for the qual­i­ty of their writ­ing. “My name goes on my book,” he declares. (So does the name “Knopf,” Mehta might have replied.) “I am respon­si­ble for the way the words are put togeth­er.” Read the let­ter in full below. And see Lit­er­ary Hub for Naipaul’s Ten Rules of Writ­ing if you’re inter­est­ed in his pre­scrip­tions for clear Eng­lish prose—advice he had earned license to take or leave in his own work.

10 May 1988

Dear Son­ny,

The copy-edit­ed text of A Turn in the South came yes­ter­day; it is such an appalling piece of work that I feel I have to write about it. This kind of copy-edit­ing gets in the way of cre­ative read­ing. I spend so much time restor­ing the text I wrote (and as a result know rather well). I thought it might have been known in the office that after 34 years and 20 books I knew cer­tain things about writ­ing and didn’t want a copy-editor’s help with punc­tu­a­tion or the thing called rep­e­ti­tion; and cer­tain­ly didn’t want help with ways of get­ting round rep­e­ti­tion. It is utter­ly absurd to have some­one point­ing out to me rep­e­ti­tions in the use of “and” or “like” or “that” or “she”. I didn’t want any­one undo­ing my semi-colons; with all their dif­fer­ent ways of link­ing.

It hap­pens that Eng­lish — the his­to­ry of the lan­guage — was my sub­ject at Oxford. It hap­pens that I know very well that these so-called “rules” have noth­ing to do with the lan­guage and are real­ly rules about French usage. The glo­ry of Eng­lish is that it is with­out these court rules: it is a lan­guage made by the peo­ple who write it. My name goes on my book. I am respon­si­ble for the way the words are put togeth­er. It is one rea­son why I became a writer.

Every writer has his own voice. (Every seri­ous or ded­i­cat­ed writer.) This is achieved by the way he punc­tu­ates; the rhythm of his phras­es; the way the writ­ing reflects the process­es of the writer’s thought: all the ner­vous­ness, all the links, all the curi­ous asso­ci­a­tions. An assid­u­ous copy-edi­tor can undo this very quick­ly, can make A write like B and Ms C.

And what a waste of spir­it it is for the writer, who is in effect re-doing bits of his man­u­script all the time instead of giv­ing it a tru­ly cre­ative, revis­ing read. Con­sid­er how it has made me sit down this morn­ing, not to my work, but to write this enraged let­ter.

Yours 

Vidia

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Oscar Wilde Offers Prac­ti­cal Advice on the Writ­ing Life in a New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Let­ter from 1890

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness