Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’re any­thing like me, you yearn to become a good writer, a bet­ter writer, an inspir­ing writer, even, by learn­ing from the writ­ers you admire. But you nei­ther have the time nor the mon­ey for an MFA pro­gram or expen­sive retreats and work­shops with famous names. So you read W.H. Auden’s essays and Paris Review inter­views with your favorite authors (or at least PR’s Twit­ter feed); you obses­sive­ly trawl the archives of The New York Times’ “Writ­ers on Writ­ing” series, and you rel­ish every Youtube clip, no mat­ter how lo-fi or trun­cat­ed, of your lit­er­ary heroes, speak­ing from beyond the grave, or from behind a podi­um at the 92nd Street Y.

Well, friend, you are in luck (okay, I’m still talk­ing about me here, but maybe about you, too). The Wash­ing­ton, DC-based non-prof­it Acad­e­my of Achieve­ment—whose mis­sion is to “bring stu­dents face-to-face” with lead­ers in the arts, busi­ness, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, and sports—has archived a series of talks from an incred­i­bly diverse pool of poets and writ­ers. They call this col­lec­tion “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class,” and you can sub­scribe to it right now on iTunes and begin down­load­ing free video and audio pod­casts from Nora Ephron, John Updike, Toni Mor­ri­son, Car­los Fuentes, Nor­man Mail­er, Wal­lace Steg­n­er, and, well, you know how the list goes.

The Acad­e­my of Achievement’s web­site also fea­tures lengthy profiles–with text and down­load­able audio and video–of sev­er­al of the same writ­ers from their “Mas­ter Class” series. For exam­ple, an inter­view with for­mer U.S. poet-lau­re­ate Rita Dove is illu­mi­nat­ing, both for writ­ers and for teach­ers of writ­ing. Dove talks about the aver­sion that many peo­ple have for poet­ry as a kind of fear incul­cat­ed by clum­sy teach­ers. She explains:

At some point in their life, they’ve been giv­en a poem to inter­pret and told, “That was the wrong answer.” You know. I think we’ve all gone through that. I went through that. And it’s unfor­tu­nate that some­times in schools — this need to have things quan­ti­fied and grad­ed — we end up doing this kind of mul­ti­ple choice approach to some­thing that should be as ambigu­ous and ever-chang­ing as life itself. So I try to ask them, “Have you ever heard a good joke?” If you’ve ever heard some­one tell a joke just right, with the right pac­ing, then you’re already on the way to the poet­ry. Because it’s real­ly about using words in very pre­cise ways and also using ges­ture as it goes through lan­guage, not the ges­ture of your hands, but how lan­guage cre­ates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can real­ize that poet­ry can also be fun.

Dove’s thoughts on her own life, her work, and the craft of poet­ry and teach­ing are well worth reading/watching in full. Anoth­er par­tic­u­lar­ly notable inter­view from the Acad­e­my is with anoth­er for­mer lau­re­ate, poet W.S. Mer­win.

Mer­win, a two-time Pulitzer Prize win­ner, dis­cuss­es poet­ry as orig­i­nat­ing with lan­guage, and its loss as tan­ta­mount to extinc­tion:

When we talk about the extinc­tion of species, I think the endan­gered species of the arts and of lan­guage and all these things are relat­ed. I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I think poet­ry goes back to the inven­tion of lan­guage itself. I think one of the big dif­fer­ences between poet­ry and prose is that prose is about some­thing, it’s got a sub­ject… poet­ry is about what can’t be said. Why do peo­ple turn to poet­ry when all of a sud­den the Twin Tow­ers get hit, or when their mar­riage breaks up, or when the per­son they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want some­thing that address­es what can’t be said.

If you’re any­thing like me, you find these two per­spec­tives on poetry—as akin to jokes, as say­ing the unsayable—fascinating. These kinds of obser­va­tions (not mechan­i­cal how-to’s, but orig­i­nal thoughts on the process and prac­tice of writ­ing itself) are the rea­son I pore over  inter­views and sem­i­nars with writ­ers I admire. I found more than enough in this archive to keep me sat­is­fied for months.

We’ve added “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class” to our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

Image via Angela Rad­ules­cu

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flan­nery O’Connor Explains the Lim­it­ed Val­ue of MFA Pro­grams: “Com­pe­tence By Itself Is Dead­ly”

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

“If it sounds like writ­ing,” says Elmore Leonard, “I rewrite it.”

Leonard’s writ­ing sounds the way peo­ple talk. It rings true. In nov­els like Get Shorty, Rum Punch and Out of Sight, Leonard has estab­lished him­self as a mas­ter styl­ist, and while his char­ac­ters may be lowlifes, his books are received and admired in the high­est cir­cles. In 1998 Mar­tin Amis recalled vis­it­ing Saul Bel­low and see­ing Leonard’s books on the old man’s shelves. “Bel­low and I agreed,” said Amis, “that for an absolute­ly reli­able and unstint­ing infu­sion of nar­ra­tive plea­sure in a prose mirac­u­lous­ly purged of all false qual­i­ties, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.”

In 2006 Leonard appeared on BBC Two’s The Cul­ture Show to talk about the craft of writ­ing and give some advice to aspir­ing authors. In the pro­gram, shown above, Leonard talks about his deep appre­ci­a­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way’s work in gen­er­al, and about his par­tic­u­lar debt to the 1970 crime nov­el The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Hig­gins. While explain­ing his approach, Leonard jots down three tips:

• “You have to lis­ten to your char­ac­ters.”
• “Don’t wor­ry about what your moth­er thinks of your lan­guage.”
• “Try to get a rhythm.”

“I always refer to style as sound,” says Leonard. “The sound of the writ­ing.” Some of Leonard’s sug­ges­tions appeared in a 2001 New York Times arti­cle that became the basis of his 2007 book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writ­ing. Here are those rules in out­line form:

1. Nev­er open a book with the weath­er.
2. Avoid pro­logues.
3. Nev­er use a verb oth­er than “said” to car­ry dia­logue.
4. Nev­er use an adverb to mod­i­fy the verb “said.”
5. Keep your excla­ma­tion points under con­trol!
6. Nev­er use the words “sud­den­ly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use region­al dialect, patois,  spar­ing­ly.
8. Avoid detailed descrip­tions of char­ac­ters.
9. Same for places and things.
10. Leave out the parts read­ers tend to skip.

You can read more from Leonard on his rules in the 2001 Times arti­cle. And you can read his new short sto­ry, “Ice Man,” in The Atlantic.

When it came to giv­ing advice to writ­ers, Kurt Von­negut was nev­er dull. He once tried to warn peo­ple away from using semi­colons by char­ac­ter­iz­ing them as “trans­ves­tite her­maph­ro­dites rep­re­sent­ing absolute­ly noth­ing.” In this brief video, Von­negut offers eight tips on how to write a short sto­ry:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wast­ed.
2. Give the read­er at least one char­ac­ter he or she can root for.
3. Every char­ac­ter should want some­thing, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sen­tence must do one of two things–reveal char­ac­ter or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as pos­si­ble.
6. Be a sadist. No mat­ter how sweet and inno­cent your lead­ing char­ac­ters, make awful things hap­pen to them–in order that the read­er may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one per­son. If you open a win­dow and make love to the world, so to speak, your sto­ry will get pneu­mo­nia.
8. Give your read­ers as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble as soon as pos­si­ble. To heck with sus­pense. Read­ers should have such com­plete under­stand­ing of what is going on, where and why, that they could fin­ish the sto­ry them­selves, should cock­roach­es eat the last few pages.

Von­negut put down his advice in the intro­duc­tion to his 1999 col­lec­tion of mag­a­zine sto­ries, Bagom­bo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an excep­tion. “The great­est Amer­i­can short sto­ry writer of my gen­er­a­tion was Flan­nery O’Con­nor,” writes Von­negut. “She broke prac­ti­cal­ly every one of my rules but the first. Great writ­ers tend to do that.”

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Kurt Von­negut: ‘How to Get a Job Like Mine’ (2002)

Kurt Von­negut Reads from Slaugh­ter­house-Five

A cou­ple sto­ries by Von­negut in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books