Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Creative Writing “Master Class”

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 28th, 2012

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.

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

Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

E.M. Forster: Why I Stopped Writing Novels (1958)

in Literature, Writing | August 9th, 2012

E.M. Forster’s later years are something of a riddle. After publishing five novels, including the classics A Passage to India and Howards End, Forster stopped writing fiction at the age of 45. He lived quietly for another 46 years and continued to write essays, short biographies and literary journalism — but no more novels.

The issues behind it are complicated, says Forster in this excerpt from a 1958 BBC interview. “But I think one of the reasons why I stopped writing novels,” he says, “is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much. I’d been accustomed to write about the old vanished world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I cannot put it into fiction form.”

At the time of the interview Forster was an honorary fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, where he lived the final 24 years of his life. He speaks of his life at Cambridge, and of his own limitations as a writer, with a sincerity and humanity that readers will recognize from his books.

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

19 Quotes on Writing by Gore Vidal. Some Witty, Some Acerbic, Many Spot On

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 3rd, 2012

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

Next to “celebrated” (or “celebrity”) the description I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acerbic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “disdainful”… I’m sure he would relish the compliment. One of the most fitting adjectives, perhaps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. The adjective fits especially well considering one of Vidal’s most-tweeted quotes from his treasury of Wilde-like aphorisms: “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.” It’s clever and morbid and naughty and devil-may-care, and almost entirely fatuous. Unlike several writers recently featured here—Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who helpfully compiled numbered lists of writing advice, Vidal’s pronouncements on his craft were rather unsystematic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was sometimes facetious, and sometimes profound. Despite his evident contempt for neat little lists, one writer in the UK has helpfully compiled one anyway. The “suicide note” quote above is number 4:

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Writer’s Digest gives us ten additional quotes of Gore Vidal on writing (unnumbered this time):

“You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.”

“I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.”

“The reason my early books are so bad is because I never had the time or the money to afford constant revisions.”

“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.”

“Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I would do if I were 20 and wanted to be a good writer. I would study maintenance, preferably plumbing. … So that I could command my own hours and make a good living on my own time.”

“If a writer has any sense of what journalism is all about he does not get into the minds of the characters he is writing about. That is something, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had discovered a new art form but, as I pointed out, all he had discovered was lying.”

“A book exists on many different levels. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the better the book will be for him, the better it will be in its own terms.”

[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes easiest:]
“Are you happier eating a potato than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writing is writing. Writing is order in sentences and order in sentences is always the same in that it is always different, which is why it is so interesting to do it. I never get bored with writing sentences, and you never master it and it is always a surprise—you never know what’s going to come next.”

[When asked how he would like to be remembered:]
“I suppose as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time.”

A series of snippets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire provides the biting (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Norman Mailer): “For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, “It’s existential.” He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.”

Vidal returns to the theme of memory in a 1974 interview with The Paris Review, in which he admits to placing the ultimate faith in his memory: “I am not a camera… I don’t consciously watch anything and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remember I remember—by no means the same thing as remembering what you would like to.”

While Vidal is memorialized this week as a celebrity and Wilde-like provocateur, it’s also worth noting that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writing itself, some of it witty but useless, some of it well worth remembering.

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.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writers

in Books, Literature, Writing | June 25th, 2012

“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:

Never open a book with the weather.
Avoid prologues.
Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
Keep your exclamation points under control!
Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Same for places and things.
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.

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 20 ) |

Watch Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, a 1963 Film That Captures the Creative Process of the Legendary Sci-Fi Author

in Literature, Television, Writing | June 14th, 2012

Story of a Writer shows all the contradictions the late Ray Bradbury embodied: An unstoppably curious admirer of science and technology who some called a “mechanical moron,” a non-driver in midcentury Los Angeles, an imaginer of the future who worked in a basement crowded with paper files and tribal masks. We watch the classic IBM motto “THINK” catch the 43-year-old writer’s eye, yet we notice another sign posted above his typewriter: “DON’T THINK!” This half-hour television documentary captures that most instinctual of craftsmen in the rational genre of science fiction in all sorts of activities grounded in his time, place, and profession: telling stories and performing magic for his daughters, offering guidance to younger writers, “workshopping” a piece with a circle of associates in his living room, bicycling through town to get ideas, and touring a fallout shelter showground.

Produced by David L. Wolper, best known for programs like Roots, The Thorn Birds, and This is Elvis, Story of a Writer interweaves with these scenes from Bradbury’s daily life a jaggedly cinematic adaptation of his short story “Dial Double Zero.” In it, a man receives a series of unwanted phone calls from what eventually starts to sound like the phone system itself, which has, for unexplained reasons, spontaneously developed intelligence. In Bradbury’s imagination, technology may do troubling things, but rarely malevolent ones. “I’ve always been in favor of science that can prolong and beautify our lives,” he says in voiceover. The broadcast even includes one of Bradbury’s many plainspoken but enthusiastic lectures about the craft of writing, which has much in common with his similarly themed 2001 speech previously featured on Open Culture. As he sums up his recommendations to aspirants concerned about the quality of their work: “It doesn’t have to be the greatest. It does have to be you.”

You can find Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer listed in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via The Atlantic

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Bradbury Reads Moving Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mission

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Kurt Vonnegut: “How To Get A Job Like Mine” (2002)

in Literature, Writing | June 8th, 2012

Kurt Vonnegut had many endearing qualities, one being that he liked to travel to universities where he delivered a talk called “How To Get A Job Like Mine.” The substance, however, was always different, and the conversation often didn’t focus on the writing life, or anything like it. The talk was really a vessel for whatever happened to be on Vonnegut’s mind, and it probably wasn’t uncommon for him to meander through his talk, as he did here, then pause and say, “Now, let’s see what the hell else I’ve got here. Where did I even start? I don’t know.”

The talk will give you a glimpse into the quirky personality that was Vonnegut’s, some non sequiturs on sex & gender, anecdotes about his uncle Alex, and then a few heartfelt thoughts on the life worth living. Eventually, we finally get to writing, or something remotely approaching it. Vonnegut was known for giving a humorous spiel on the “shape” or “blueprint” of the story, explaining what Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cinderella all have in common. If you want to zero in on that famous bit, feel free to jump ahead. But be warned that you’ll be missing a lot of sweet randomness and good fun.

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

in Books, Writing | April 4th, 2012

Like fellow genre icon Stephen King, Ray Bradbury has reached far beyond his established audience by offering writing advice to anyone who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to keyboard; “Use whatever works,” he often says.) In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene University’s Writer’s Symposium By the Sea, Bradbury tells stories from his writing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out practices that make up what he calls “writing hygiene.” Watch this entertainingly digressive talk and you might pull out an entirely different set of points, but here, in list form, is how I interpret Bradbury’s program:

Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.

Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28.

Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.

Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”

The Shape of A Story: Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 33 ) |

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

in Literature, Writing | February 27th, 2012

Today is the 110th birthday of writer John Steinbeck, whose great novel of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an eloquent and sympathetic voice to the dispossessed. In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” You can watch him deliver his Nobel speech above.

And for insights into how Steinbeck reached that pinnacle, you can read a collection of his observations on the art of fiction from the Fall, 1975 edition of The Paris Review, including six writing tips jotted down in a letter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The following,” Steinbeck writes, “are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person–a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it–bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue–say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

“As you write,” Steinbeck says, “trust the disconnections and the gaps. If you have written what your eye first saw and you are stopped, see again. See something else. Take a leap to another image. Don’t require of yourself that you understand the connection. Some of the most brilliant things that happen in fiction occur when the writer allows what seems to be a disconnected image to lead him or her away from the line that was being taken.”

Remembering Ernest Hemingway, Fifty Years After His Death

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Creative Writing “Master Class”

E.M. Forster: Why I Stopped Writing Novels (1958)

19 Quotes on Writing by Gore Vidal. Some Witty, Some Acerbic, Many Spot On

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writers

Watch Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, a 1963 Film That Captures the Creative Process of the Legendary Sci-Fi Author

Kurt Vonnegut: “How To Get A Job Like Mine” (2002)

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search