Martin Amis Explains His Method for Writing Great Sentences

in Literature, Writing | June 24th, 2020

Why does Mar­tin Amis writes sen­tences well? As a nov­el­ist, he nat­u­ral­ly has a high degree of pro­fes­sion­al inter­est in the mat­ter. But why does he write sen­tences so well? One might put forth the influ­ence of his father Kings­ley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, an endur­ing con­tender for the title of the fun­ni­est nov­el in the Eng­lish lan­guage. But giv­en how sel­dom one acclaimed nov­el­ist sires anoth­er — an event, in fact, near­ly unheard of — the her­i­tabil­i­ty of lit­er­ary tal­ent remains unknow­able. As for the direct influ­ence of Amis père on Amis fils, we can almost entire­ly rule it out: not only did Kings­ley nev­er encour­age Mar­tin to fol­low in his foot­steps, only once did he offer any kind of writer­ly advice.

“We sat in high-bour­geois splen­dor, my father and I,” writes the younger Amis in his mem­oir Expe­ri­ence, “hav­ing a pre-lunch drink and talk­ing about his first pub­lished sto­ry, ‘The Sacred Rhi­no of Ugan­da’ (1932: he was ten).” The father-son dia­logue runs as fol­lows:

— It was awful in all the usu­al ways. And full of false quan­ti­ties. Things like: ‘Rag­ing and curs­ing in the blaz­ing heat …’

— What’s wrong with that? I mean I can see it’s old fash­ioned …

— You can’t have three ings like that.

— Can’t you?

— No. It would have to be: ‘Rag­ing and curs­ing in the … intol­er­a­ble heat.’

You couldn’t have three ings like that. And some­times you couldn’t even have two. The same went for -ics, -ives, -lys and -tions. And the same went for all pre­fix­es too.

43 years lat­er, Mar­tin Amis would find him­self in the role of lit­er­ary advice-giv­er, deliv­er­ing his father’s prin­ci­ple of writ­ing onstage at the Chica­go Human­i­ties Fes­ti­val. The process of imbu­ing every sen­tence with “min­i­mum ele­gance and eupho­ny,” he says in the clip above (drawn from a longer inter­view view­able here) involves “say­ing the sen­tence, sub­vo­cal­iz­ing it in your head until there’s noth­ing wrong with it. This means not repeat­ing in the same sen­tence suf­fix­es and pre­fix. If you’ve got a con­found, you can’t have a con­form. If you’ve got invi­ta­tion, you can’t have exe­cu­tion. You can’t repeat those, or an -ing, or a -ness: all that has to be one per sen­tence. I think the prose will give a sort of plea­sure with­out you being able to tell why.”

Clear­ly writ­ing a sen­tence that has “noth­ing wrong with it” goes well beyond adher­ing to the rules of spelling and gram­mar. And even after you’ve elim­i­nat­ed all ungain­ly rep­e­ti­tion, you may still have con­sid­er­able work to do before the sen­tence ris­es to a stan­dard worth uphold­ing. There are oth­er ques­tions to ask: do you, for exam­ple, tru­ly pos­sess each and every one of the words you’ve used, not just in mean­ing but sound and rhythm? In order to do so, Amis rec­om­mends acquaint­ing your­self more inti­mate­ly with the dic­tio­nary and the­saurus. If all this makes the task of the aspir­ing writer sound need­less­ly daunt­ing, fol­low instead the much sim­pler advice Amis pro­vides in the clip just above: “Get to the end of the nov­el, then wor­ry, because you’ve got some­thing in front of you that you can work on. Save the anx­i­ety for the end.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Amis Explains How to Use a The­saurus to Actu­al­ly Improve Your Writ­ing

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­tin Amis, No Strangers to Con­tro­ver­sy, Talk in 1991

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

V.S. Naipaul Cre­ates a List of 7 Rules for Begin­ning Writ­ers

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

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Write Only 500 Words Per Day and Publish 50+ Books: Graham Greene’s Writing Method

in Books, Creativity, Writing | May 19th, 2020

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Nobody can write a book. That is, nobody can write a book at a stroke — unless aid­ed by aggres­sive­ly mind-invig­o­rat­ing sub­stances, and even then they sel­dom pull it off. As pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers know all too well, com­pos­ing just one pass­able chap­ter at a sit­ting demands a Stakhanovite for­ti­tude (or more com­mon­ly, a threat­en­ing­ly close dead­line). Books are writ­ten less one chap­ter at a time than one sec­tion at a time, less one sec­tion at a time than one para­graph at a time, less one para­graph at a time than one sen­tence at a time, and less one sen­tence at a time than one word at a time. Gra­ham Greene wrote his for­mi­da­ble body of work, more than 50 books, includ­ing nov­els, poet­ry and short fic­tion col­lec­tions, mem­oirs, and chil­dren’s sto­ries, 500 words at a time.

In one of his most beloved nov­els, 1951’s The End of the Affair, Greene has his writer pro­tag­o­nist Mau­rice Ben­drix describe a work­ing method much like his own:

Over twen­ty years I have prob­a­bly aver­aged five hun­dred words a day for five days a week. I can pro­duce a nov­el in a year, and that allows time for revi­sion and the cor­rec­tion of the type­script. I have always been very method­i­cal, and when my quo­ta of work is done I break off, even in the mid­dle of a scene. Every now and then dur­ing the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hun­dreds on my man­u­script. No print­er need make a care­ful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page is marked the fig­ure — 83,764.

In his youth, Ben­drix notes, “not even a love affair would alter my sched­ule,” nor could one inter­rupt the night­ly phase of his process: “How­ev­er late I might be in get­ting to bed — as long as I slept in my own bed — I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it.”

Much of a nov­el­ist’s writ­ing, he believes, “takes place in the uncon­scious; in those depths the last word is writ­ten before the first word appears on paper. We remem­ber the details of our sto­ry, we do not invent them.” Greene, too, set enough store by the uncon­scious to keep a dream jour­nal. A few year after The End of the Affair, writesThe New York­er’s Maria Kon­niko­va, “he faced a cre­ative ‘block­age,’ as he called it, that pre­vent­ed him from see­ing the devel­op­ment of a sto­ry or even, at times, its start. The dream jour­nal proved to be his sav­ior.”

All of us who write, what­ev­er we write, can learn from Greene’s meth­ods; Michael Kor­da got to wit­ness them first-hand. In the sum­mer of 1950 he was invit­ed by his uncle, the film pro­duc­er Alexan­der Kor­da, to come along on a French-Riv­iera cruise with a vari­ety of major indus­try fig­ures, Greene includ­ed. By that point Greene had already writ­ten a fair few screen­plays, includ­ing adap­ta­tions of his own nov­els Brighton Rock and The Third Man. But each morn­ing on the yacht he worked on a more per­son­al project, as the six­teen-year-old Kor­da watched:

An ear­ly ris­er, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pock­et a small black leather note­book and a black foun­tain pen, the top of which he unscrewed care­ful­ly. Slow­ly, word by word, with­out cross­ing out any­thing, and in neat, square hand­writ­ing, the let­ters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempt­ing to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, Gra­ham wrote, over the next hour or so, exact­ly five hun­dred words. He count­ed each word accord­ing to some arcane sys­tem of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turn­ing to me, said, “That’s it, then. Shall we have break­fast?” I did not, of course, know that he was com­plet­ing The End of the Affair.

This work­ing rit­u­al, a Kor­da describes it, suits the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the writer, a con­vert to Catholi­cism who dealt with themes of reli­gious prac­tice in his work:

Greene’s self-dis­ci­pline was such that, no mat­ter what, he always stopped at five hun­dred words, even if it left him in the mid­dle of a sen­tence. It was as if he brought to writ­ing the pre­ci­sion of a watch­mak­er, or per­haps it was that in a life full of moral uncer­tain­ties and con­fu­sion he sim­ply need­ed one area in which the rules, even if self-imposed, were absolute. What­ev­er else was going on, his dai­ly writ­ing, like a reli­gious devo­tion, was sacred and com­plete. Once the dai­ly penance of five hun­dred words was achieved, he put the note­book away and did­n’t think about it again until the next morn­ing.

Just as Greene’s adher­ence to Catholi­cism lost some of its rig­or in his lat­er years (he claimed to have been con­vert­ed by argu­ments, then for­got­ten the argu­ments), his dai­ly word count decreased. “In the old days, at the begin­ning of a book, I’d set myself 500 words a day, but now I’d put the mark to about 300 words,” a 66-year-old Greene told the New York Times in 1971. But such are the wages of the nov­el­ist’s art, in which Greene felt a demand to “know — even if I’m not writ­ing it — where my char­ac­ter’s sit­ting, what his move­ments are. It’s this focus­ing, even though it’s not focus­ing on the page, that strains my eyes, as though I were watch­ing some­thing too close.”

Greene was­n’t alone in writ­ing a cer­tain num­ber of words each day. Accord­ing to a post at Word Counter, Ernest Hem­ing­way got start­ed on his own 500 dai­ly words at first light. Ian McE­wan says he aims “for about six hun­dred words a day and hope for at least a thou­sand when I’m on a roll.” For the more pro­lif­ic J.G. Bal­lard, a thou­sand was the min­i­mum, “even if I’ve got a hang­over. You’ve got to dis­ci­pline your­self if you’re pro­fes­sion­al. There’s no oth­er way.” The near-inhu­man­ly pro­lif­ic Stephen King dou­bles that: “I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words,” he says in his mem­oir On Writ­ing. “On some days those ten pages come eas­i­ly; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thir­ty in the morn­ing, perky as a rat in liv­er­wurst. More fre­quent­ly, as I grow old­er, I find myself eat­ing lunch at my desk and fin­ish­ing the day’s work around one-thir­ty in the after­noon.”

John Updike, no slouch when it came to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, rec­om­mend­ed writ­ing for a length of time rather than to a num­ber of words. “Even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say — or more — a day to write,” he says in an inter­view clip pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “Some very good things have been writ­ten on an hour a day.” At The Guardian, nov­el­ist Neil Grif­fiths dis­cuss­es his apos­ta­sy from the thou­sand-words-a-day method: “I’m writ­ing a nov­el — an artis­tic enter­prise, one hopes — but I was mea­sur­ing my work­ing day by a num­ber.” Switch­ing to the “fin­ish the bit you’re work­ing on” method, he writes, means he does­n’t have “half an eye on what is going to hap­pen in the next bit because with­out it I’ll nev­er make the day’s 1000. My sole con­cern is the words before me, how­ev­er many or few they are, and get­ting them right before mov­ing on.” And so, it seems, those of us try­ing to get our life’s work writ­ten have two options: do what Gra­ham Greene did, or do the oppo­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Updike’s Advice to Young Writ­ers: ‘Reserve an Hour a Day’

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writ­ing Process: Keep a Diary, Car­ry a Note­book, Read Out Loud, Aban­don Hope

Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: The Dis­ci­pline That Fueled Her Imag­i­na­tion

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

The Sev­en Road-Test­ed Habits of Effec­tive Artists

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Cork-Lined Bedroom & Writing Room of Marcel Proust, the Original Master of Social Distancing

in Books, Writing | March 30th, 2020

Many of us now find our­selves stuck at home, doing our part to put a stop to the glob­al coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Some of us are tak­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to write the ambi­tious works of lit­er­a­ture we’ve long intend­ed to. Such an effort of cre­ativ­i­ty in con­fine­ment has no more suit­able prece­dent than the life of Mar­cel Proust, who wrote much of his sev­en-vol­ume mas­ter­piece In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps per­du) in bed. The Paris Review’s Sadie Stein quotes Proust’s biog­ra­ph­er Diana Fuss describ­ing him as hav­ing writ­ten “from a semi-recum­bent posi­tion, sus­pend­ed mid­way between the realms of sleep­ing and wak­ing using his knees as a desk.”

He did it in a bed­room lined with cork, an addi­tion meant, Stein writes, “not just to sound­proof but to pre­vent pollen and dust from aggra­vat­ing Proust’s aller­gies and asth­ma.” Though the Span­ish flu did make its way into France dur­ing Proust’s last years, the writer had been wor­ried about his own frail health since his first asth­ma attack at the age of nine.

He got the idea of lin­ing his bed­room with cork from his friend Anna de Noailles, “a princess and socialite, a patron of the arts and a nov­el­ist in her own right,” who also hap­pened to be “plagued with debil­i­tat­ing fears and neu­roses.” You can vis­it faith­ful recon­struc­tions of both of their bed­rooms at Paris Musée Car­navalet, an essen­tial stop on any Proust pil­grim­age. So is the Hôtel Ritz Paris, which main­tains a “Mar­cel Proust suite.”

William Fried­kin — yes, that William Fried­kin — stayed in the Mar­cel Proust suite, “for­mer­ly a pri­vate din­ing room on the hotel’s sec­ond floor, where Proust often host­ed small din­ner par­ties,” on the Proust pil­grim­age he recalls in The New York Times. “I was told by the hotel man­ag­er that the room was reserved for Proust to enter­tain when­ev­er he could ven­ture out from his cork-lined bed­room at 102 Boule­vard Hauss­mann.” No doubt Proust “absorbed inspi­ra­tion from con­ver­sa­tions here, ones that made their way into his writ­ing.” In the last three years of his life, the writ­ing almost entire­ly dis­placed the con­ver­sa­tion: Proust spent almost all his time in his cork-lined bed­room, sleep­ing by day and putting every­thing he had into his work at night. A con­tem­po­rary pho­to­graph of Proust’s cork-lined bed­room appears at the top of the post, as recent­ly includ­ed in a tweet by writer Ted Gioia call­ing Proust the “mas­ter of social dis­tanc­ing.”

Just above, you can watch a talk on the writer’s room and hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ties (of both the aes­thet­ic and phys­i­cal vari­eties) that put him into it by Proust schol­ar William C. Carter, author of Mar­cel Proust: A Life and Proust in Love. What might Proust’s father, the epi­demi­ol­o­gist Adrien Proust, have thought about a new epi­dem­ic mak­ing the peo­ple of the 21st cen­tu­ry look to his son?  Even if we don’t take him as a mod­el for writ­ing life, this is nev­er­the­less an appro­pri­ate moment to read his work (now avail­able free online at the Inter­net Archive’s Nation­al Emer­gency Library). “What Proust inspires in us is to see and to appre­ci­ate every seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant place or object or per­son in our lives,” writes Fried­kin, “to real­ize that life itself is a gift and all the peo­ple we’ve come to know have qual­i­ties worth con­sid­er­ing and cel­e­brat­ing — in time.”

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free eBooks: Read All of Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past on the Cen­ten­ni­al of Swann’s Way

An Intro­duc­tion to the Lit­er­ary Phi­los­o­phy of Mar­cel Proust, Pre­sent­ed in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

When James Joyce & Mar­cel Proust Met in 1922, and Total­ly Bored Each Oth­er

16-Year-Old Mar­cel Proust Tells His Grand­fa­ther About His Mis­guid­ed Adven­tures at the Local Broth­el

The First Known Footage of Mar­cel Proust Dis­cov­ered: Watch It Online

The Nation­al Emer­gency Library Makes 1.5 Mil­lion Books Free to Read Right Now

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Free Online Writing & Journalism Courses

in Online Courses, Writing | January 8th, 2020

Image by Book Mama, via Flickr Com­mons

See our meta col­lec­tion–1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties–for a com­plete list of online cours­es, cov­er­ing near­ly every sub­ject.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Why the University of Chicago Rejected Kurt Vonnegut’s Master’s Thesis (and How a Novel Got Him His Degree 27 Years Later)

in Literature, Writing | December 18th, 2019

vonnegut drawing

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Kurt Von­negut has been gone a dozen years now, but in that time his stock in the world of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture has only risen. Just a few months ago we fea­tured the new­ly opened Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library here on Open Cul­ture, and we’ve also post­ed about every­thing from his writ­ing tips to his let­ters to his draw­ings. And we’ve fea­tured his con­cep­tion of “the shape of all sto­ries” as orig­i­nal­ly laid out in his mas­ter’s the­sis at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, where between 1945 and 1947 he per­formed anthro­po­log­i­cal research into the Native Amer­i­can-inspired Ghost Dance reli­gious move­ment of the late 19th cen­tu­ry. “The fun­da­men­tal idea,” wrote Von­negut, “is that sto­ries have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a giv­en society’s sto­ries is at least as inter­est­ing as the shape of its pots or spear­heads.”

None of this flew with the anthro­pol­o­gy depart­ment. In an essay in his book Palm Sun­day Von­negut explains the unan­i­mous rejec­tion of his the­sis, “The Fluc­tu­a­tions Between Good and Evil in Sim­ple Tasks,” due to the fact that “it was so sim­ple and looked like too much fun. One must not be too play­ful.” Opt­ing not to have a sec­ond go before the com­mit­tee, the still-young Von­negut — with his har­row­ing expe­ri­ence in the Sec­ond World War only a cou­ple of years behind him — decid­ed to take a job as a pub­li­cist at Gen­er­al Elec­tric instead. In 1950, while still employed at GE, he would first pub­lish a piece of fic­tion: “Report on the Barn­house Effect” in Col­lier’s mag­a­zine. “Years lat­er,” says the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Chron­i­cle’s obit­u­ary for Von­negut, “the uni­ver­si­ty accept­ed Cat’s Cra­dle as Vonnegut’s the­sis, award­ing him an A.M. in 1971.”

“This was not an hon­orary degree but an earned one,” said Von­negut in a 1973 inter­view, “giv­en on the basis of what the fac­ul­ty com­mit­tee called the anthro­po­log­i­cal val­ue of my nov­els. I snapped it up most cheer­ful­ly and I con­tin­ue to have noth­ing but friend­ly feel­ings for the Uni­ver­si­ty.” Indeed, Von­negut called his time as a Phoenix “the most stim­u­lat­ing years of my life.” Gen­er­a­tions of read­ers have found in Von­negut’s work — not just Cat’s Cra­dle, the one that final­ly got him his aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials, but oth­er nov­els like Moth­er Night, Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons, and of course Slaugh­ter­house-Five as well — some of the most stim­u­lat­ing writ­ing to come out of post­war Amer­i­ca. And yet Von­negut, as he writes in Palm Sun­day, con­tin­ued to regard his first mas­ter’s the­sis as “my pret­ti­est con­tri­bu­tion to my cul­ture.” The more suc­cess­ful the cre­ator, it can often seem, the more dear he holds his fail­ures.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assign­ment from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop Teach­es You to Read Fic­tion Like a Writer

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

 

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

in Writing | December 15th, 2019

Last Feb­ru­ary, Neil Gaiman sat down for a 90-minute inter­view with author, entre­pre­neur and pod­cast­er Tim Fer­riss. At the 13:30 mark, the con­ver­sa­tion turns to Gaiman’s writ­ing process, and there begins a long and love­ly detour into the world of foun­tain pens (the Pilot 823, Vis­con­tis, and the New York Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal in NYC), note­books (why he prefers Leucht­turm Ger­man note­books to Mole­sk­ines), and how he writes his nov­els out by hand. It’s all care­ful­ly thought out:

Tim Fer­riss: Are there any oth­er rules or prac­tices that you also hold sacred or impor­tant for your writ­ing process?

Neil Gaiman: Some of them are just things for me. For exam­ple, most of the time, not always, I will do my first draft in foun­tain pen, because I actu­al­ly enjoy the process of writ­ing with a foun­tain pen. I like the feel­ing of foun­tain pen. I like uncap­ping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing, so I’ll have a note­book, I’ll have a foun­tain pen, and I’ll write. If I’m doing any­thing long, if I’m work­ing on a nov­el, for exam­ple, I will always have two foun­tain pens on the go, at least, with two dif­fer­ent col­ored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance, how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, “Look at that! Five pages in brown. How about that? Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue, cool, what a great day.”

You can just get a sense of are you work­ing, are you mak­ing for­ward progress? What’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing. I also love that because it empha­sizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolute­ly go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gen­der, num­ber of a char­ac­ter, you can bring some­body dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know any­thing that hap­pens in your first draft. It is you telling the sto­ry to your­self.

Then, I’ll sit down and type. I’ll put it onto a com­put­er, and as far as I’m con­cerned, the sec­ond draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

Tim Fer­riss: Do you edit, then, as you’re look­ing or trans­lat­ing from the first draft on the page to the com­put­er, or do you get it all down as is in the com­put­er and then edit —

Neil Gaiman: No, that’s my edit­ing process. I fig­ure that’s my sec­ond draft is typ­ing into the com­put­er. Also, I love — back­ing up a bit here. When I was, what was I? 27, 28? In the days when we were still in type­writ­ers and we were just a hand­ful of peo­ple with word proces­sors, which were clunky things with disks which didn’t hold very much and stuff, I edit­ed an anthol­o­gy and enjoyed edit­ing my anthol­o­gy.

Most of the sto­ries that came in were about 3,000 words long. Move for­ward in time, not much, five, six, sev­en years. Mid ‘90s, every­body is now on com­put­er, and I edit­ed anoth­er short sto­ry anthol­o­gy. The sto­ries that were com­ing in tend­ed to be some­where between six- and 9,000 words long. They didn’t real­ly have much more sto­ry than the 3,000 word ones, and I real­ized that what was hap­pen­ing is it’s a computer‑y thing, is if you’re typ­ing, putting stuff down is work. If you’ve got a com­put­er, adding stuff is not work. Choos­ing is work. It expands a bit, like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it, and I thought, “Okay, I have to not do that, because oth­er­wise my stuff is going to bal­loon and it will become gaseous and thin.”

What I love, if I’ve writ­ten some­thing on a com­put­er, and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I’ve lost work. I delete a page and a half, I feel like there’s a page and half that just went away. That was a page and a half’s worth of work I’ve just lost. If I’ve been writ­ing in a note­book and I’m typ­ing it up, I can look at some­thing and go, “Oh, I don’t need this page and a half.” I leave it out, I just saved myself work, and it feels like I’m treat­ing myself.

I’m just try­ing to always have in my head the idea that maybe I’m some­how, on some cos­mic lev­el, pay­ing some­body by the word in order to be allowed to write, but if they’re there, they should mat­ter, they should mean some­thing. It’s always impor­tant to me.

Tim Fer­riss: You men­tioned dis­trac­tion ear­li­er and your dan­ger­ous­ly adorable son, which I cer­tain­ly agree with. I had read some­where, actu­al­ly, before I get to that, this might seem like a very, very mun­dane ques­tion, but what type of note­books do you pre­fer? Are they large legal pads or are they leather bound? What type of note­books?

Neil Gaiman: When they came out, I real­ly liked — I’ve used a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent ones. I bought big draw­ing ones, which actu­al­ly turned out to be a bit too big, though I liked how much I could see on the page. Those are the ones I wrote Star­dust and Amer­i­can Gods in, big size, but they weren’t ter­ri­bly portable. I went over to the Mole­sk­ines, and I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper qual­i­ty. Drop­ping paper qual­i­ty doesn’t mat­ter, unless you’re writ­ing in foun­tain pen, because all of a sud­den it’s bleed­ing through, and all of a sud­den you’re writ­ing on one page, leav­ing a page blank because it’s bled through and then writ­ing on the next page.

Joe Hill, about six or sev­en years ago, Joe Hill, the won­der­ful hor­ror fan­ta­sy writer, sug­gest­ed the Leucht­turm to me. My usu­al note­book right now is a Leucht­turm, because I real­ly like the way you can pag­i­nate stuff in them and the thick­ness of the paper, and they’re just like Mole­sk­ines, but the Porsche of Mole­sk­ines. They’re just bet­ter.

I also have been writ­ing, I wrote The Grave­yard Book and I’m writ­ing the cur­rent nov­el in these beau­ti­ful books that I bought in a sta­tionery shop in Venice, built into a bridge. Some­where in Venice there’s a lit­tle sta­tionery shop on a bridge, and they have these beau­ti­ful leather-bound blank books that just look like hard­back books, but they’re blank pages. I wrote The Grave­yard Book in one of those. I bought four of them, and now I’m using the next one on the next nov­el, and it may well go into anoth­er one. I’m not sure.

Then, at home, I say at home, my house in Wis­con­sin, which is where my stuff is, I’ve got my — we live in Wood­stock, but I have an entire life’s worth of stuff still sit­ting in my house in Wis­con­sin, and it’s become archives. It’s actu­al­ly kind of fab­u­lous hav­ing a house that is an archive, but wait­ing for me in that house is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago, and before I die, I plan to write a nov­el in it. It’s an accounts book from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry. It’s 500 pages long. Every page is num­bered. It’s lined with accounts lines, but real­ly faint so it would be nice to write a book in it, and it is engi­neered so that every sin­gle page lies flat.

It’s huge and it’s heavy and it just looks like a book that Dick­ens or some­body would’ve writ­ten a nov­el in and I’ve just been wait­ing until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dick­en­sian enough, and whether or not I actu­al­ly get to write it in dip pen, I’m not sure, but I def­i­nite­ly want to write it in an old Vic­to­ri­an, some­thing slight­ly cop­per plat­ing. One of those old flex nib pens that they stopped mak­ing when car­bon paper came in, just so I can get that spi­dery Vic­to­ri­an hand­writ­ing.

Tim Fer­riss: I’m just imag­in­ing you putting pen to the first page. When you fin­ish the first page and what that will feel like. That’s going to be a good day.

Neil Gaiman: It will be either a good day or an incred­i­bly bad day. When you get to the end of the first page, it’s “Oh no! I had this pris­tine — ” it is the thing that I tell young writ­ers, and by young writ­ers, a young writer can be any age. You just have to be start­ing out, which is any­thing you do can be fixed. What you can­not fix is the per­fec­tion of a blank page. What you can­not fix is that pris­tine, unsul­lied white­ness of a screen or a page with noth­ing on it, because there’s noth­ing there to fix.

Tim Fer­riss: You men­tioned a word, and it might be that I’m a lit­tle slow mov­ing because I’m from Long Island, but Leucht­turm? What is that word?

Neil Gaiman: L‑E-I-C‑H, I think it’s T‑U-R‑M, and then 1917, I think is — their Twit­ter han­dle is def­i­nite­ly Leuchtturm1917.

Tim Fer­riss: Leucht­turm, and I’ll put that in the show notes for folks, so you’ll be able to find it. Since you gave me — I’m not intend­ing to turn this episode into a shop­ping list, but I’ve nev­er used foun­tain pens.

Neil Gaiman: Real­ly?

Tim Fer­riss: I have not. My assis­tant, my dear assis­tant does. She loves using foun­tain pens. She enjoys the act. I’ve had a few slop­py false starts and then been rather impa­tient, but if I want­ed to give it a shot, are there any par­tic­u­lar foun­tain pens or cri­te­ria that you would use in pick­ing a good pen?

Neil Gaiman: The biggest cri­te­ria I would use in pick­ing, if you have the choice, is go some­where like New York’s Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal.

Tim Fer­riss: Is that a real place?

Neil Gaiman: It’s a real place. It’s called The Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal. They sell lots of new pens, they recon­di­tion old pens, they look after pens for you. And try them out, because the love­ly thing about foun­tain pens is they are per­son­al. You go, “No, no, no.” And then you find the one. I tend to sug­gest to peo­ple who are just ner­vous­ly — “I’ve nev­er used a foun­tain pen, what should I do?” I will point them at Lamy, L‑A-M‑Y, who have some fab­u­lous starter pens, and they’re not very expen­sive, and they’re good. They do a pen called The Safari, but they have a bunch of good starter pens, and they’re just nice to get into the idea of, “Do I like doing this?”

Let’s see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? This one here is a Pilot. It’s a Nami­ki, and it’s a flex­ing nib ever so slight­ly when you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It’s a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful pen. That one’s a Pilot. I think this one here is the Nami­ki. It’s real­ly weird because Nami­ki is Pilot, so I don’t quite under­stand that.

Tim Fer­riss: Maybe it’s a Toyota/Lexus thing?

Neil Gaiman: I think it is. It’s that kin­da thing. This one here is called a Fal­con, and again, you put a lit­tle bit of weight on it, and the line will just spread and thick­en, which is part of the fun of foun­tain pens. I’ll go and play. There’s a love­ly Ital­ian one. I’ve got my agent, I did a thing some years ago when I real­ized that I was los­ing a lot of actu­al writ­ing time to sign­ing for­eign con­tracts.

Tim Fer­riss: This is for books?

Neil Gaiman: This is for books, or occa­sion­al­ly for sto­ries or things being reprint­ed around the world. The con­tracts would come in and there would be big sheaves of them because they get print­ed all around the world, and for­eign con­tracts, a lot of them you have to sign a lot. You have to do a lot of ini­tial­ing and I would sit there going, “I have just spent 90 min­utes sign­ing a pile of con­tracts, and I love that I got to sign it, but —” I con­tact­ed my agent. I said, “Can I give you pow­er of attor­ney? Would you mind? Would you just sign these things for me?”

She was like, “Absolute­ly!” Great. I got her — she’d nev­er used a foun­tain pen and I got her a foun­tain pen. I actu­al­ly went to The New York Foun­tain Pen Hos­pi­tal with her, and did the thing of show­ing her pens, “What do you like?” I got her a Vis­con­ti, which are just these love­ly Ital­ian pens. Most­ly I love, there’s a slight­ly fetishis­tic bit of hav­ing bot­tles of beau­ti­ful­ly col­ored ink. When you start talk­ing to foun­tain pen peo­ple, they real­ly — they pre­tend to be inter­est­ed in what pen you like, but they don’t care, because they’ve found their own pens that they love.

They say, “What do you use?”

I use Pilot 823s for sign­ing. Actu­al­ly now, I’ve got a Pilot 823, ’cause it’s just a fan­tas­tic sign­ing pen. It’s a work­horse, it keeps going, and I got one in 2012 and it was my sign­ing pen. I signed through Ocean at the End of the Lane. Before the book had come out, I had already pre-signed, writ­ten my sig­na­ture 20,000 times with this pen.

Tim Fer­riss: I have some footage of you icing your hand after said sign­ings.

Neil Gaiman: That was a sign­ing tour that I real­ly got into icing my hand and wrist and arm. I did the num­bers, and as far as I can tell, I’ve signed about one and a half mil­lion sig­na­tures with that pen, which remained, and I had to send it off to Pilot at one point, not because the nib was in trou­ble, because the plunger mech­a­nism was start­ing to stick, and they fixed it for me and sent it back. Then my three-year-old son found a place behind a cast iron fire­place in our house in Wood­stock where if you just insert your father’s Pilot 823 pen, which you have found on the table, just to see if it would go in there, you can actu­al­ly guar­an­tee that with­out dis­as­sem­bling the house, we actu­al­ly have to take the entire house apart to unin­stall a cast iron fire­place from 1913 to get at the pen. That pen now has been giv­en as a sac­ri­fice to the house gods, so I need to get a new one.

Tim Fer­riss: Its strikes me, at least it seems as we’re talk­ing that many of the deci­sions you’ve made, the tools you’ve found and enlist­ed, act to make not writ­ing unap­peal­ing, or at least bor­ing after five min­utes, and to enhance the act of writ­ing to make it some­thing that is enjoy­able. I don’t know if that’s true.

Neil Gaiman: That is true, but they also exist for anoth­er rea­son, which is kind of weird, which is to try and triv­i­al­ize what I’m doing and not make it impor­tant and freight­ed down with weight, because that par­a­lyzes me. When I start­ed writ­ing I had a type­writer. It was a man­u­al type­writer. When I sold my first book, I had the mon­ey to buy an elec­tric type­writer.

Tim Fer­riss: What was that first book?

Neil Gaiman: Gosh. I actu­al­ly don’t remem­ber whether I bought the elec­tric type­writer with the mon­ey from a book called Ghast­ly Beyond Belief, a book of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy quo­ta­tions I did with Kim New­man, or whether it was for the Duran Duran biog­ra­phy that I did. Either way, I was just 23. What I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, sin­gle spaced so that it couldn’t be used, and also so that I could get as many words on. Paper was expen­sive. I could always do that. I remem­ber the joy of get­ting my first com­put­er, and just the idea that I wasn’t mak­ing paper dirty. Noth­ing mat­tered until I pressed print, and that was absolute­ly and utter­ly lib­er­at­ing.

And then, a decade on, pick­ing up a note­book, it was for Star­dust, which I’d decid­ed that I want­ed the rhythms of Star­dust to be very anti­quat­ed rhythms, and I thought there’s prob­a­bly a dif­fer­ence to the way that one writes with a foun­tain pen. 17 cen­tu­ry writ­ing, 17th, 18th cen­tu­ry writ­ing, you notice tends to go in very, very long sen­tences and long para­graphs. My the­o­ry about this is that one rea­son why you get this is because you’’re using dip pens, and if you pause, they dry up. You just have to keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writ­ing where you’re going for a very long sen­tence and you’re going to go for a long para­graph and you’re going to keep mov­ing in this thing, and you’re think­ing ahead.

If you’re writ­ing on a com­put­er, you’ll think of the sort of thing that you mean, and then write that down and look at it and then fid­dle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you’re writ­ing in foun­tain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page cov­ered with cross­ings out, so it’s actu­al­ly so much eas­i­er to just think a lit­tle bit more. You slow up a bit, but you’re think­ing the sen­tence through to the end, and then you start writ­ing.

You write that, and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypoth­e­sized that I might be writ­ing, and I want­ed Star­dust to feel like it had been writ­ten in the late 1920s. I thought to do that I should prob­a­bly get myself a foun­tain pen and a book, so that was how I start­ed writ­ing that. Again, what I loved was sud­den­ly feel­ing lib­er­at­ed. Say­ing, “Ah, I’m not actu­al­ly mak­ing words that are not going down in phos­phor on a com­put­er screen.”

Watch the full inter­view above. Stream it as a pod­cast. Or read the com­plete tran­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

18 Sto­ries & Nov­els by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Read­ings by Neil Him­self

Neil Gaiman Reads His Man­i­festo on Mak­ing Art: Fea­tures the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Neil Gaiman Teach­es the Art of Sto­ry­telling in His New Online Course

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

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David Sedaris Teaches Storytelling & Humor His New Masterclass

in Online Courses, Writing | December 6th, 2019

For more than 25 years, the hol­i­day sea­son has brought to the radio not just Christ­mas car­ols but a diaris­tic mono­logue by a writer with, in every sense, a dis­tinc­tive voice. When it first aired on Morn­ing Edi­tion, “San­ta­land Diaries” made David Sedaris’ name, not that he holds the piece in esteem as high as some of his fans do. “Peo­ple will say, ‘Oh, I loved that San­ta­land thing,’ ” Sedaris said in a recent inter­view, but “that thing is so clunki­ly writ­ten. I mean, it’s just hor­ri­bly writ­ten, and peo­ple can’t even see it.” Most are “lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry, but they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to how it’s con­struct­ed, or they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to the words that you used. They’re not hear­ing the craft of it.” Sedaris fans who do hear the craft of it may well be in the tar­get audi­ence for a new Mas­ter­class taught by the man him­self.

Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Mas­ter­class­es by writ­ers as intel­lec­tu­al­ly and styl­is­ti­cal­ly var­i­ous as Joyce Car­ol Oates, Mal­colm Glad­well, Mar­garet Atwood, and Dan Brown. But we’ve nev­er con­duct­ed inves­ti­ga­tions into any of their writ­ing process­es in the same way we have into Sedaris’ writ­ing process, his own view of which con­sti­tutes the core of his Mas­ter­class’ con­tent. “If you write about peo­ple, you have to be inter­est­ed in peo­ple,” he says in the trail­er above. For him that means ask­ing unex­pect­ed ques­tions, like “Do your chil­dren show­er?” or “Who’s the drunk­est cus­tomer you’ve had today?” It also means keep­ing a diary in which to record the answers, and with which, even more impor­tant­ly, to main­tain a dai­ly writ­ing habit.

Even now, with a full sched­ule of read­ings to give around the world, Sedaris writes every day with­out fail. But he also did it for fif­teen years before “The San­ta­land Diaries” brought him the atten­tion that got his first book pub­lished. “I meet a lot of young writ­ers and I say, ‘Do you write every day?’ ” he men­tions in one les­son. “They say, ‘No, but just — you know, I write when it strikes me.’ I don’t know. I sup­pose that might work for some peo­ple.” But it cer­tain­ly would­n’t work for him, nor would doing few­er than his cus­tom­ary twelve to eigh­teen rewrites of each piece. In oth­er lessons he cov­ers such aspects of the craft as “observ­ing the world,” “con­nect­ing with the read­er,” “end­ing with weight,” and “writ­ing about loved ones.”

For that last les­son Sedaris brings in a spe­cial guest: his sis­ter Lisa, there to talk about what it feels like to be writ­ten about by her famous­ly obser­vant broth­er. That will come as a spe­cial treat for any­one who rec­og­nizes her from all her appear­ances in Sedaris’ fam­i­ly sto­ries, but each les­son seems to play to Sedaris’ strengths as a writer as well as a per­former: he gives read­ings of diary entries and pub­lished pieces, but also gives his stu­dents advice on how to han­dle read­ings of their own in the future. Sedaris makes no promis­es that the course will bestow upon all who take it a world­view as dis­tinc­tive as his, to say noth­ing of a fan base as lucra­tive as his, but it will sure­ly make them bet­ter at “hear­ing the craft of it,” a skill as wor­thy of cul­ti­va­tion as it is rare. You can sign up for Sedaris’ course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writ­ing Process: Keep a Diary, Car­ry a Note­book, Read Out Loud, Aban­don Hope

Why David Sedaris Hates America’s Favorite Word, “Awe­some”

David Sedaris Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Jazz Tracks: Stream Them Online

Steve Mar­tin Teach­es His First Online Course on Com­e­dy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Novelist Cormac McCarthy Gives Writing Advice to Scientists … and Anyone Who Wants to Write Clear, Compelling Prose

in Literature, Science, Writing | October 3rd, 2019

As we point­ed out back in 2017, Cor­mac McCarthy, author of such grit­ty, blood-drenched nov­els as Blood Merid­i­an, Child of God, The Road, and No Coun­try for Old Men, prefers the com­pa­ny of sci­en­tists to fel­low writ­ers. Since the mid-nineties, he has main­tained a desk at the San­ta Fe Insti­tute, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary sci­en­tif­ic think tank, and has served as a vol­un­teer copy-edi­tor for sev­er­al sci­en­tists, includ­ing Lisa Ran­dall, Harvard’s first female tenured the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, and physi­cist Geof­frey West, author of the pop­u­lar sci­ence book Scale.

One of McCarthy’s first such aca­d­e­m­ic col­lab­o­ra­tions came after a friend, econ­o­mist W. Bri­an Arthur, mailed him an arti­cle in 1996. McCarthy helped Arthur com­plete­ly revise it, which sent the edi­tor of the Har­vard Busi­ness Review into a “slight pan­ic,” the econ­o­mist remem­bers. I can’t imag­ine why, but then I’d rather read any of McCarthy’s nov­els than most aca­d­e­m­ic papers. Not that I don’t love to be exposed to new ideas, but it’s all about the qual­i­ty of the writ­ing.

Schol­ar­ly writ­ing has, after all, a rep­u­ta­tion for obscu­ri­ty, and obfus­ca­tion for a rea­son, and not only in post­mod­ern phi­los­o­phy. Sci­en­tif­ic papers also rely heav­i­ly on jar­gon, over­ly long, incom­pre­hen­si­ble sen­tences, and dis­ci­pli­nary for­mal­i­ties that can feel cold and alien­at­ing to the non-spe­cial­ist. McCarthy iden­ti­fied these prob­lems in the work of asso­ciates like biol­o­gist and ecol­o­gist Van Sav­age, who has “received invalu­able edit­ing advice from McCarthy,” notes Nature, “on sev­er­al sci­ence papers pub­lished over the past 20 years.”

Dur­ing “live­ly week­ly lunch­es” with the author dur­ing the win­ter of 2018, Sav­age dis­cussed the fin­er points of McCarthy’s edit­ing advice. Then Sav­age and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Pamela Yeh present­ed the con­densed ver­sion at Nature for a wider audi­ence. Below, we’ve excerpt­ed some of the most strik­ing of “McCarthy’s words of wis­dom.” Find the com­plete com­pi­la­tion of McCarthy’s advice over at Nature.

  • Use min­i­mal­ism to achieve clar­i­ty…. Remove extra words or com­mas when­ev­er you can.
  • Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every read­er to remem­ber…. If some­thing isn’t need­ed to help the read­er to under­stand the main theme, omit it.
  • Lim­it each para­graph to a sin­gle mes­sage.
  • Keep sen­tences short, sim­ply con­struct­ed and direct.
  • Try to avoid jar­gon, buzz­words or over­ly tech­ni­cal lan­guage. And don’t use the same word repeatedly—it’s bor­ing.
  • Don’t over-elab­o­rate. Only use an adjec­tive if it’s rel­e­vant…. Don’t say the same thing in three dif­fer­ent ways in any sin­gle sec­tion.
  • Choose con­crete lan­guage and exam­ples.
  • When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to your­self or a friend. Find a good edi­tor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.
  • Final­ly, try to write the best ver­sion of your paper—the one that you like. You can’t please an anony­mous read­er, but you should be able to please your­self.
  • When you make your writ­ing more live­ly and eas­i­er to under­stand, peo­ple will want to invest their time in read­ing your work.

As Kot­tke points out, “most of this is good advice for writ­ing in gen­er­al.” This is hard­ly a sur­prise giv­en the source, though, as McCarthy’s pri­ma­ry body of work demon­strates, lit­er­ary writ­ers are free to tread all over these guide­lines as long as they can get away with it. Still, his straight­for­ward advice is an invi­ta­tion for writ­ers of all kinds—academic, pop­u­lar, aspir­ing, and professional—to remind them­selves of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of clear, com­pelling com­mu­nica­tive prose.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Cor­mac McCarthy Became a Copy-Edi­tor for Sci­en­tif­ic Books and One of the Most Influ­en­tial Arti­cles in Eco­nom­ics

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

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial

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

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