When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!

Image by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“How did Faulkn­er pull it off?” is a ques­tion many a fledg­ling writer has asked them­selves while strug­gling through a peri­od of appren­tice­ship like that nov­el­ist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkn­er.” Barth “reorches­trat­ed” his lit­er­ary heroes, he says, “in search of my writer­ly self… down­load­ing my innu­mer­able pre­de­ces­sors as only an insa­tiable green appren­tice can.” Sure­ly a great many writ­ers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkn­er at his most invo­lut­ed and incan­ta­to­ry who most enchant­ed me.” For many a writer, the Faulkner­ian sen­tence is an irre­sistible labyrinth. His syn­tax has a way of weav­ing itself into the uncon­scious, emerg­ing as fair to mid­dling imi­ta­tion.

While study­ing at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty, Barth found him­self writ­ing about his native East­ern Shore of Mary­land in a pas­tiche style of “mid­dle Faulkn­er and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a vis­it­ing young William Sty­ron, “but the fin­ished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkn­er inti­mate­ly knew his Snopses and Comp­sons and Sar­toris­es, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Mary­land marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a uni­ver­sal com­mand­ment. But study­ing the way that Faulkn­er wrote when he turned to the sub­jects he knew best pro­vides an object les­son on how pow­er­ful a lit­er­ary resource inti­ma­cy can be.

Not only does Faulkner’s deep affil­i­a­tion with his char­ac­ters’ inner lives ele­vate his por­traits far above the lev­el of local col­or or region­al­ist curios­i­ty, but it ani­mates his sen­tences, makes them con­stant­ly move and breathe. No mat­ter how long and twist­ed they get, they do not wilt, with­er, or drag; they run riv­er-like, turn­ing around in asides, out­rag­ing them­selves and dou­bling and tripling back. Faulkner’s inti­ma­cy is not earnest­ness, it is the uncan­ny feel­ing of a raw encounter with a nerve cen­ter light­ing up with infor­ma­tion, all of it seem­ing­ly crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant.

It is the extra­or­di­nary sen­so­ry qual­i­ty of his prose that enabled Faulkn­er to get away with writ­ing the longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture, at least accord­ing to the 1983 Guin­ness Book of World Records, a pas­sage from Absa­lom, Absa­lom! consist­ing of 1,288 words and who knows how many dif­fer­ent kinds of claus­es. There are now longer sen­tences in Eng­lish writ­ing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a 33-page long whop­per with 13,955 words in it. Entire nov­els hun­dreds of pages long have been writ­ten in one sen­tence in oth­er lan­guages. All of Faulkner’s mod­ernist con­tem­po­raries, includ­ing of course Joyce, Woolf, and Beck­ett, mas­tered the use of run-ons, to dif­fer­ent effect.

But, for a time, Faulkn­er took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no inten­tion of inspir­ing post­mod­ern fic­tion, but one of its best-known nov­el­ists, Barth, only found his voice by first writ­ing a “heav­i­ly Faulkner­ian marsh-opera.” Many hun­dreds of exper­i­men­tal writ­ers have had almost iden­ti­cal expe­ri­ences try­ing to exor­cise the Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that one­time longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture, all 1,288 words of it, below.

Just exact­ly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back think­ing Mad impo­tent old man who real­ized at last that there must be some lim­it even to the capa­bil­i­ties of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his sit­u­a­tion as that of the show girl, the pony, who real­izes that the prin­ci­pal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fid­dle and drum but from a clock and cal­en­dar, must have seen him­self as the old wornout can­non which real­izes that it can deliv­er just one more fierce shot and crum­ble to dust in its own furi­ous blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still with­in his scope and com­pass and saw son gone, van­ished, more insu­per­a­ble to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be dif­fer­ent and those to call him by it strangers and what­ev­er dragon’s out­crop­ping of Sut­pen blood the son might sow on the body of what­ev­er strange woman would there­fore car­ry on the tra­di­tion, accom­plish the hered­i­tary evil and harm under anoth­er name and upon and among peo­ple who will nev­er have heard the right one; daugh­ter doomed to spin­ster­hood who had cho­sen spin­ster­hood already before there was any­one named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to suc­cor her in bereave­ment and sor­row found nei­ther but instead that calm absolute­ly impen­e­tra­ble face between a home­spun dress and sun­bon­net seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chick­ens while Jones was build­ing the cof­fin and which she wore dur­ing the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own gar­ments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excus­ing what help they had from Jones who lived with his grand­daugh­ter in the aban­doned fish­ing camp with its col­laps­ing roof and rot­ting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sut­pen was to lend him, make him bor­row to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not veg­etable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indig­na­tion had swept her back to town to live on stolen gar­den truck and out o f anony­mous bas­kets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daugh­ters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watch­ing from her dis­tance as the two daugh­ters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient vari­cose and despair­ing Faus­tus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoul­der, run­ning his lit­tle coun­try store now for his bread and meat, hag­gling tedious­ly over nick­els and dimes with rapa­cious and pover­ty-strick­en whites and negroes, who at one time could have gal­loped for ten miles in any direc­tion with­out cross­ing his own bound­ary, using out of his mea­gre stock the cheap rib­bons and beads and the stale vio­lent­ly-col­ored can­dy with which even an old man can seduce a fif­teen-year-old coun­try girl, to ruin the grand­daugh­ter o f his part­ner, this Jones-this gan­gling malar­ia-rid­den white man whom he had giv­en per­mis­sion four­teen years ago to squat in the aban­doned fish­ing camp with the year-old grand­child-Jones, part­ner porter and clerk who at the demon’s com­mand removed with his own hand (and maybe deliv­ered too) from the show­case the can­dy beads and rib­bons, mea­sured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the grand­daugh­ter to fash­ion a dress to walk past the loung­ing men in, the side-look­ing and the tongues, until her increas­ing bel­ly taught her embar­rass­ment-or per­haps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who dur­ing the next four years got no near­er than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and veg­eta­bles on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daugh­ter (and Clytie too, the one remain­ing ser­vant, negro, the one who would for­bid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depend­ed on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite fre­quent now) after­noons when the demon would sud­den­ly curse the store emp­ty of cus­tomers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his order­ly or even his house ser­vants when he had them (and in which he doubt­less ordered Jones to fetch from the show­case the rib­bons and beads and can­dy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sit­ting now who in the old days, the old dead Sun­day after­noons of monot­o­nous peace which they spent beneath the scup­per­nong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the ham­mock while Jones squat­ted against a post, ris­ing from time to time to pour for the demon from the demi­john and the buck­et of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squat­ting again, chortling and chuck­ling and say­ing ‘Sho, Mis­ter Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drink­ing turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sit­ting but reach­ing after the third or sec­ond drink that old man’s state of impo­tent and furi­ous unde­feat in which he would rise, sway­ing and plung­ing and shout­ing for his horse and pis­tols to ride sin­gle-hand­ed into Wash­ing­ton and shoot Lin­coln (a year or so too late here) and Sher­man both, shout­ing, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Ker­nel; sho now’ and catch­ing him as he fell and com­man­deer­ing the first pass­ing wag­on to take him to the house and car­ry him up the front steps and through the paint­less for­mal door beneath its fan­light import­ed pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alter­ation in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bed­room and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down him­self on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘fly­er I am, Ker­nel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the reg­i­ment when the grand­daugh­ter was only eight years old would tell peo­ple that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and nig­gers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and per­haps in time came to believe the lie him­self, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Ker­nel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest dur­ing that first furi­ous peri­od while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable will­ing the Sutpen’s Hun­dred which he remem­bered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hope­less-blind Jones who appar­ent­ly saw still in that furi­ous lech­er­ous wreck the old fine fig­ure of the man who once gal­loped on the black thor­ough­bred about that domain two bound­aries of which the eye could not see from any point.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

‘Nev­er Be Afraid’: William Faulkner’s Speech to His Daughter’s Grad­u­at­ing Class in 1951

5 Won­der­ful­ly Long Lit­er­ary Sen­tences by Samuel Beck­ett, Vir­ginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzger­ald & Oth­er Mas­ters of the Run-On

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

William Faulkn­er Out­lines on His Office Wall the Plot of His Pulitzer Prize Win­ning Nov­el, A Fable (1954)

Rare 1952 Film: William Faulkn­er on His Native Soil in Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi

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

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Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

Image by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Some refer to the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that is, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem in which each sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar idea or con­cept, whether abstract or con­crete. That’s true of cer­tain Chi­nese char­ac­ters, but only a small minor­i­ty. Most of them are actu­al­ly logographs, each of which rep­re­sents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their his­to­ry — and the his­to­ry of oth­er Asian lan­guages that use Chi­nese-derived vocab­u­lary — you’ll find that some start­ed out long ago as pic­tographs, designed visu­al­ly to rep­re­sent the thing to which they referred.

That does­n’t hold true for Chi­nese alone: it appears, in fact, that all writ­ten lan­guages began as forms of pic­to­graph­ic “pro­to-writ­ing,” at least judg­ing by the ear­li­est texts cur­rent­ly known to man. If we look at the old­est of them all, the lime­stone “Kish tablet” unearthed from the site of the epony­mous ancient Sumer­ian city in mod­ern-day Iraq, we can in some sense “read” sev­er­al of the sym­bols in its text, even five and a half mil­len­nia after it was writ­ten. “The writ­ing on its sur­face is pure­ly pic­to­graph­ic,” says the nar­ra­tor of the brief IFLScience video below, “and rep­re­sents a mid­point between pro­to-writ­ing and the more sophis­ti­cat­ed writ­ing of the cuneiform.”

Cuneiform, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, was used by the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans to label maps and record stew recipes, among oth­er impor­tant tasks. “First devel­oped around 3200 B.C. by Sumer­ian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of record­ing trans­ac­tions, cuneiform writ­ing was cre­at­ed by using a reed sty­lus to make wedge-shaped inden­ta­tions in clay tablets,” says Archae­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Over 3,000 years, this ear­li­est prop­er script “was used by scribes of mul­ti­ple cul­tures over that time to write a num­ber of lan­guages oth­er than Sumer­ian, most notably Akka­di­an, a Semit­ic lan­guage that was the lin­gua fran­ca of the Assyr­i­an and Baby­lon­ian Empires.”

Cuneiform was also used to write the Scheil dynas­tic tablet, which dates from the ear­ly sec­ond mil­len­ni­um BC. That means we can read it, and thus know that it com­pris­es a lit­er­ary-his­tor­i­cal text that lists off the reigns of var­i­ous rulers of Sumer­ian cities. We should note that the Scheil dynas­tic tablet is also, some­times, referred to as the “Kish tablet,” which sure­ly caus­es some con­fu­sion. But for the anony­mous writer of the ear­li­er Kish tablet, who would have lived about two mil­len­nia ear­li­er, the emer­gence of cuneiform and all the civ­i­liza­tion­al devel­op­ments it would make pos­si­ble lay far in the future. His pic­to­graph­ic text may nev­er be deci­phered prop­er­ly or mapped to a his­tor­i­cal­ly doc­u­ment­ed lan­guage, but at least we can tell that he must sure­ly have had hands and feet more or less like our own.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Lan­guage – It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

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

Watch the Opening Credits of an Imaginary 70s Cop Show Starring Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beck­ett: avant-garde drama­tist, brood­ing Nobel Prize win­ner, poet, and…gritty tele­vi­sion detec­tive?

Sad­ly, no, but he had the mak­ings of a great one, at least as cut togeth­er by play­wright Dan­ny Thomp­son, cofounder of Chicago’s The­ater Oobleck.

Some 35 years after Beckett’s death, Thompson—whose cred­its include the Com­plete Lost Works of Samuel Beck­ett as Found in a Dust­bin in Paris in an Enve­lope (Par­tial­ly Burned) Labeled: Nev­er to Be Per­formed. Nev­er. Ever. Ever! Or I’ll Sue! I’ll Sue From the Grave!!!-repur­posed Rosa Veim and Daniel Schmid’s footage of the moody genius wan­der­ing around 1969 Berlin into the open­ing cred­its of a nonex­is­tent, 70s era Quinn Mar­tin police pro­ce­dur­al.

The title sequence hits all the right peri­od notes, from the jazzy graph­ics to the pre­sen­ta­tion of its sup­port­ing cast: Andre the Giant, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean “Hug­gy Bear” Cocteau. (Did you know that Beck­ett drove a young Andre the Giant to school in real life?)

Thomp­son ups the verisimil­i­tude by cop­ping Pat Williams’ theme for The Streets of San Fran­cis­co and nam­ing the imag­i­nary pilot episode after a col­lec­tion of Beckett’s short sto­ries.

He also jok­ing­ly notes that a DVD release of the first, only and, again, entire­ly non-exis­tent sea­son has been held up by the Beck­ett estate. Alas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Samuel Beck­ett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

The Books That Samuel Beck­ett Read and Real­ly Liked (1941–1956)

Hear Samuel Beckett’s Avant-Garde Radio Plays: All That FallEmbers, and More

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Samuel Beck­ett, Absur­dist Play­wright, Nov­el­ist & Poet

When Samuel Beck­ett Drove Young André the Giant to School: A True Sto­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

Think back, if you will, to the cli­mac­tic scenes of Indi­ana Jones and the Last Cru­sade, which take place in the hid­den tem­ple that con­tains the Holy Grail. His father hav­ing been shot by the das­tard­ly Nazi-sym­pa­thiz­ing immor­tal­i­ty-seek­er Wal­ter Dono­van, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the leg­endary cup to make use of its reput­ed heal­ing pow­ers. This entails pass­ing through three dead­ly cham­bers, one of which has a floor cov­ered in stones, each one labeled with a let­ter of the alpha­bet. The way through, accord­ing to Jones père’s research, is the name of God. But when Indy steps on “J” for Jeho­vah, it crum­bles away, and he near­ly plunges into the enor­mous pit below.

Of course, true fans will have already quot­ed the rel­e­vant line: “But in the Latin alpha­bet, Jeho­va begins with an I!” Those of us who first watched the movie as kids — and, for that mat­ter, many of us who first watched it as adults — sim­ply took that fact as giv­en. But if we watch the Rob­Words video above, we can learn how and when that “I” became a “J”.

To the ancient Romans, explains host Rob Watts, these let­ters were one and the same, serv­ing both vow­el and con­so­nant duty depend­ing on the con­text (as in “Iulius” Cae­sar). Both of them date back to a “rather more com­pli­cat­ed char­ac­ter” that looks like a bad­ly con­tort­ed F, and which orig­i­nat­ed as a pic­togram rep­re­sent­ing a human hand and fore­arm.

The let­ter J only emerged lat­er, “when scribes want­ed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between these two usages.” (As we’ve seen, it also offered the descen­dants of the Knights Tem­plar a way to trick inter­lop­ers in their cav­erns.) Through­out the course of the video, Watts cov­ers this and oth­er curi­ous steps in the evo­lu­tion of the alpha­bet we use to write Eng­lish and many oth­er lan­guages today. These pro­duced such fea­tures as the plur­al of knife and wolf being knives and wolves, the seem­ing super­fluity of Q, and — for an Eng­lish­man like Watts, an unig­nor­able sub­ject — the transat­lantic “zed”/“zee” divid­ing line. Exam­ined close­ly, the forms of our let­ters tells a mil­len­nia-span­ning sto­ry whose cast includes Egyp­tians, Phoeni­cians, Canaan­ites, Etr­uscans, Greeks, Romans, and oth­ers besides. And as the expe­ri­ence of Indi­ana Jones illus­trates, you nev­er know when you’ll need its lessons.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

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

RIP Paul Auster: Hear the Master of the Postmodern Page-Turner Discuss How He Became a Writer

In the Louisiana Chan­nel inter­view clip from 2017 above, the late Paul Auster tells the sto­ry of how he became a writer. Its first episode had appeared more than twen­ty years ear­li­er, in a New York­er piece titled “Why Write?”: “I was eight years old. At that moment in my life, noth­ing was more impor­tant to me than base­ball.” After the first big-league game he ever went to see, the New York Giants ver­sus the Mil­wau­kee Braves at the Polo Grounds, he came face-to-face with a leg­end-to-be named Willie Mays. “I man­aged to keep my legs mov­ing in his direc­tion and then, mus­ter­ing every ounce of my courage, I forced some words out of my mouth. ‘Mr. Mays,’ I said, ‘could I please have your auto­graph?’ ”

Mays says yes, but there was a prob­lem: “I didn’t have a pen­cil, so I asked my father if I could bor­row his. He didn’t have one, either. Nor did my moth­er. Nor, as it turned out, did any of the oth­er grownups.” Even­tu­al­ly, the young Auster’s idol “turned to me and shrugged. ‘Sor­ry, kid,’ he said. ‘Ain’t got no pen­cil, can’t give no auto­graph.’ And then he walked out of the ball­park into the night.” From that point on, as the mid­dle-aged Auster tells it, “it became a habit of mine nev­er to leave the house with­out mak­ing sure I had a pen­cil in my pock­et.” Even in this child­hood anec­dote, read­ers will rec­og­nize some of Auster’s sig­na­ture ele­ments: the icons of mid-cen­tu­ry New York, the life-chang­ing chance encounter, the state of bit­ter regret.

But it takes more than a pen­cil to become a writer. “The thing about doing this, which is unlike any oth­er job, is that you have to give max­i­mum effort, all the time,” Auster says. “You have to give every ounce of your being to what you’re doing, and I don’t think there are many jobs that require that. You see lazy lawyers, lazy doc­tors, lazy judges. They can get through things. You even see lazy ath­letes.” But “you can’t be a writer or a painter or a musi­cian unless you make max­i­mum effort.” Even after pro­duc­ing noth­ing usable in one of his usu­al eight-hour writ­ing shifts, “I can at least stand up and say, at the end of the day, I gave it every­thing I had. I tried 100 per­cent. And there’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing about that, just try­ing as hard as you can to do some­thing.”

There’s some­thing thor­ough­ly Amer­i­can about these words, as indeed there’s some­thing thor­ough­ly Amer­i­can about Auster’s twen­ty post­mod­ern page-turn­ers (to say noth­ing of his many vol­umes of non­fic­tion and poet­ry). Yet he also had one foot in France, where he lived in the ear­ly nine­teen-sev­en­ties, and sev­er­al of whose respect­ed writ­ers — Sartre, Mal­lar­mé, Blan­chot — he trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. He gained his first and most fer­vent fan­base there, becom­ing a beloved écrivain amer­i­can of long stand­ing. The announce­ment of his death on April 30th must have set off some­thing like a nation­al day of mourn­ing, and an occa­sion to remem­ber what he once said to France Inter: just as a writer should always car­ry a pen­cil, “cha­cun doit être prêt à mourir n’im­porte quand.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Paul Auster Read the Entire­ty of The Red Note­book, an Ear­ly Col­lec­tion of Sto­ries

Paul Auster Reads from New Nov­el Sun­set Park

Read and Hear Famous Writ­ers (and Arm­chair Sports­men) J. M. Coet­zee and Paul Auster’s Cor­re­spon­dence

Philip Roth Pre­dicts the Death of the Nov­el; Paul Auster Coun­ters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Ernest Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring, Young Writers (1935)

Here in the twen­ty-twen­ties, a hope­ful young nov­el­ist might choose to enroll in one of a host of post-grad­u­ate pro­grams, and — with luck — there find a will­ing and able men­tor. Back in the nine­teen-thir­ties, things worked a bit dif­fer­ent­ly. “In the spring of 1934, an aspir­ing writer named Arnold Samuel­son hitch­hiked from Min­neso­ta to Flori­da to see if he could land a meet­ing with his favorite author,” says Nicole Bianchi, nar­ra­tor of the InkWell Media video above. “The writer he had picked to be his men­tor? Ernest Hem­ing­way.”

What Hem­ing­way offered Samuel­son was some­thing more than a lit­er­ary men­tor­ship. “This young man had one oth­er obses­sion,” Hem­ing­way writes in a 1935 Esquire piece. “He had always want­ed to go to sea.” And so “we gave him a job as a night watch­man on the boat which fur­nished him a place to sleep and work and gave him two or three hours’ work each day at clean­ing up and a half of each day free to do his writ­ing.” To Hem­ing­way’s irri­ta­tion, Samuel­son proved not just a clum­sy hand on the Pilar, but a fount of ques­tions about how to craft lit­er­a­ture — some­thing Hem­ing­way gives the impres­sion of con­sid­er­ing eas­i­er done than said.

Nev­er­the­less, in the Esquire piece, Hem­ing­way con­dens­es this long back-and-forth with Samuel­son into a dia­logue con­tain­ing lessons that “would have been worth fifty cents to him when he was twen­ty-one.” He first declares that “good writ­ing is true writ­ing,” and that such truth depends on the writer’s con­sci­en­tious­ness and knowl­edge of life. As for the val­ue of imag­i­na­tion, “the more he learns from expe­ri­ence the more tru­ly he can imag­ine.” But even the most world-weary nov­el­ist must “con­vey every­thing, every sen­sa­tion, sight, feel­ing, place and emo­tion to the read­er,” and that requires round after round of revi­sion, so you might as well do the first draft in pen­cil.

As far as the writ­ing itself, Hem­ing­way rec­om­mends read­ing over at least your last two or three chap­ters at the start of each day, and repeats his well-known dic­tum always to leave a lit­tle water in the well at the end so that “your sub­con­scious will work on it all the time.” But all will be for naught if you haven’t read enough great books so as to “write what has­n’t been writ­ten before or beat dead men at what they have done.” Don’t com­pete with liv­ing writ­ers, whom Hem­ing­way saw as propped up by “crit­ics who always need a genius of the sea­son, some­one they under­stand com­plete­ly and feel safe in prais­ing, but when these fab­ri­cat­ed genius­es are dead they will not exist.”

The video focus­es on a series of men­tal exer­cis­es Hem­ing­way explains to Samuel­son. Recall an excit­ing expe­ri­ence, such as that of catch­ing a fish, and “find what gave you the emo­tion, what the action was that gave you the excite­ment. Then write it down mak­ing it clear so the read­er will see it too and have the same feel­ing you had.” Remem­ber con­flicts and try to under­stand all the points of view: “If I bawl you out try to fig­ure out what I’m think­ing about as well as how you feel about it. If Car­los curs­es Juan think what both their sides of it are. Don’t just think who is right.” When oth­er peo­ple talk, “lis­ten com­plete­ly. Don’t be think­ing what you’re going to say.”

Under­ly­ing this char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly straight­for­ward advice is the com­mand­ment to find ways out of your own head and into the per­spec­tive of the rest of human­i­ty. The nec­es­sary habits of obser­va­tion can be cul­ti­vat­ed any­where: at sea, yes, but also in the city, where you can “stand out­side the the­atre and see how peo­ple dif­fer in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars.” In the event, Samuel­son nev­er did become a nov­el­ist, though he did write a mem­oir about his year under Hem­ing­way’s tute­lage. What­ev­er the expe­ri­ence taught Samuel­son, it brought Hem­ing­way to a res­o­lu­tion of his own: “If any more aspi­rant writ­ers come on board the Pilar let them be females, let them be very beau­ti­ful and let them bring cham­pagne.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

The (Urban) Leg­end of Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Sto­ry: “For sale, Baby shoes, Nev­er worn”

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer (1934)

28 Tips for Writ­ing Sto­ries from Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkn­er, Ernest Hem­ing­way & F. Scott Fitzger­ald

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

Though Jane Austen has­n’t pub­lished a nov­el since 1817 — with her death that same year being a rea­son­able excuse — her appeal as a lit­er­ary brand remains prac­ti­cal­ly unpar­al­leled in its class. This cen­tu­ry has offered its own film and tele­vi­sion ver­sions of all her major nov­els from Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty to Per­sua­sion, and even minor ones like San­di­tion and Lady Susan. As for the loos­er adap­ta­tions and Austen-inspired works in oth­er media, it would be dif­fi­cult even to count them. But to under­stand why Austen endures, we must go back to Austen her­self: to nov­els, that is, and to the enter­tain­ing­ly inno­v­a­tive man­ner in which she wrote them.

At the begin­ning of her very first book says Evan Puschak, Austen “did some­thing that changed fic­tion for­ev­er.” Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has in his lat­est video cho­sen Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty as an exam­ple with which to explain the key tech­nique that set its author’s work apart. When, in the scene in ques­tion, the dying Hen­ry Dash­wood makes his son John promise to take care of his three half-sis­ters, the younger man inward­ly resolves to him­self to give them a thou­sand pounds each. “Yes, he would give them three thou­sand pounds,” Austen writes. “It would be lib­er­al and hand­some! It would be enough to make them com­plete­ly easy. Three thou­sand pounds! He could spare so lit­tle a sum with a lit­tle incon­ve­nience.”

What, exact­ly, is going on here? Before this pas­sage, Puschak explains, “the nar­ra­tor is describ­ing the thoughts and feel­ings of John Dash­wood.” But then, “some­thing changes: it’s sud­den­ly as if we’re inside John’s mind. And yet, the point of view does­n’t change: we’re still in the third per­son.” This is a notable ear­ly exam­ple of what’s called “free indi­rect style,” which lit­er­ary crit­ic D. A. Miller describes as a “tech­nique of close writ­ing that Austen more or less invent­ed for the Eng­lish nov­el.” When she employs it, “the nar­ra­tion’s way of say­ing is con­stant­ly both mim­ic­k­ing, and dis­tanc­ing itself from, the char­ac­ter’s way of see­ing.”

In his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Miller pays a good deal of atten­tion to the lat­er Emma, with its “unprece­dent­ed promi­nence of free indi­rect style.” When, in Austen’s hand, that style “mim­ics Emma’s thoughts and feel­ings, it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly inflects them into keen­er obser­va­tions of its own; for our ben­e­fit, if nev­er for hers, it iden­ti­fies, ridicules, cor­rects all the secret van­i­ties and self-decep­tions of which Emma, pleased as Punch, remains com­i­cal­ly uncon­scious. And this is gen­er­al­ly what being a char­ac­ter in Austen means: to be slapped sil­ly by a nar­ra­tion whose con­stant bat­ter­ing; how­ev­er sat­is­fy­ing — or ter­ri­fy­ing — to read­ers, its recip­i­ent is kept from even notic­ing.” Austen may have been a nov­el­ist of great tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy and social acu­ity, but she also under­stood the eter­nal human plea­sure of shar­ing a laugh at the delu­sion­al behind their back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

Jane Austen Writes a Let­ter to Her Sis­ter While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

How to Use Writing to Sharpen Your Thinking: Advice from Tim Ferriss

With the rise of AI tools like Chat­G­PT, which can gen­er­ate essay after essay near-instan­ta­neous­ly from even the sim­plest prompt, sure­ly the skill of writ­ing will soon go the way of arrow­head-sharp­en­ing. That would be easy to believe, any­way, amid the cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal buzz. But ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Paul Gra­ham, a man as well-placed as any to grasp these devel­op­ments and their prospects, sees things dif­fer­ent­ly. “Peo­ple are switch­ing to using Chat­G­PT to write things for them with almost inde­cent haste,” he wrote in a Twit­ter thread last year. “This is going to have unfor­tu­nate con­se­quences, just as switch­ing to liv­ing in sub­ur­bia and dri­ving every­where did. When you lose the abil­i­ty to write, you also lose some of your abil­i­ty to think.”

Gra­ham is also well-known as an essay­ist, and in recent years the iden­ti­ty of writ­ing and think­ing has become one of his major themes. He opens “Putting Ideas into Words” with the obser­va­tion that “writ­ing about some­thing, even some­thing you know well, usu­al­ly shows you that you did­n’t know it as well as you thought.” And “if writ­ing down your ideas always makes them more pre­cise and more com­plete, then no one who has­n’t writ­ten about a top­ic has ful­ly formed ideas about it.” In the video above, Tim Fer­riss (anoth­er fig­ure, like Gra­ham, well known in the greater Sil­i­con Val­ley uni­verse) offers a few tips on just how to form and improve your own ideas through the process of writ­ing.

“With­out writ­ing, it’s very hard to freeze your think­ing on paper so that you can sharp­en it,” elim­i­nat­ing “words that aren’t well-defined” or “things that don’t need to be said.” The first step to mas­ter­ing the craft is to “write any­thing” reg­u­lar­ly, with­out regard to struc­ture or qual­i­ty, which expos­es “where you are sharp and where you are dull in your think­ing.” From there, you must bear in mind the old saw that “writ­ing is rewrit­ing,” going on to per­form round after round of edits from your own per­spec­tive or dif­fer­ent imag­ined ones. Gra­ham sug­gests mak­ing the effort to read your writ­ing as if you were a com­plete stranger, some­one “who knows noth­ing of what’s in your head, only what you wrote.”

Fer­ris then rec­om­mends ask­ing peo­ple you know to read over your writ­ing. If you don’t have any con­nec­tions to pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers, any­one with legal train­ing should be able to bring a keen crit­i­cal eye to the task. Even a non-spe­cial­ist can help by point­ing out the parts they find con­fus­ing. Who­ev­er Fer­ris enlists as a proof­read­er, he employs what he calls the “ten per­cent rule,” request­ing that the read­er of the text indi­cate “the ten per­cent I should keep no mat­ter what.” Even if you have no desire to write pro­fes­sion­al­ly, this prac­tice will keep you in men­tal shape for your cho­sen pur­suit in life, or indeed, for the task of life itself. As Gra­ham tweet­ed last year, “Read­ing won’t be obso­lete till writ­ing is, and writ­ing won’t be obso­lete till think­ing is” — though the aver­age day on social media may con­vince you that the lat­ter has already come to pass.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Craft of Writ­ing Effec­tive­ly: Essen­tial Lessons from the Long­time Direc­tor of UChicago’s Writ­ing Pro­gram

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

Three Huge Vol­umes of Sto­ic Writ­ings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Fer­riss

10 Writ­ing Tips from Leg­endary Writ­ing Teacher William Zinss­er

Umber­to Eco’s 36 Rules for Writ­ing Well (in Eng­lish or Ital­ian)

Neil Gaiman Talks Dream­i­ly About Foun­tain Pens, Note­books & His Writ­ing Process in His Long Inter­view with Tim Fer­riss

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

 

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