Charles Bukowski Explains What Good Writing and the Good Life Have in Common

in Writing | September 12th, 2019

I have no pol­i­tics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spir­it, which after all does sound rather shal­low, like a pitch­man, but which means most­ly my spir­it, which means yours too, for if I am not tru­ly alive, how can I see you?

—Charles Bukows­ki, Notes of. Dirty Old Man

In Notes of a Dirty Old Man, his week­ly col­umn for the under­ground L.A. news­pa­per Open City, Charles Bukows­ki became the com­mon man’s philoso­pher, issu­ing pro­fun­di­ties amidst wild vul­gar­i­ties and prov­ing that he did, in fact, have a pol­i­tics, as much as he had the­o­ries and con­trar­i­an half-thoughts and opin­ions aplen­ty. He took sides when it came to lit­er­a­ture, at least—the side of Celine, Dos­to­evsky, and Camus, for exam­ple, against Faulkn­er, Shake­speare, and George Bernard Shaw (“the most overblown fan­ta­sy of the Ages”).

Bukows­ki had no room for cool appre­ci­a­tion or mild pref­er­ence. With him, as with Cat­ul­lus, life was love and hate. Get him talk­ing on any sub­ject and those loves and hates would emerge, as would his ideas about mat­ters of most con­se­quence: life, death, drink­ing, sex, and, of course, writ­ing. In the inter­view clip above, for exam­ple, Bukows­ki is asked if he fears death. He answers, “No, in fact, I almost feel good at the approach of death.” This becomes a med­i­ta­tion on rep­e­ti­tion and dull­ness, and on the “juice” that a good life—and good writing—requires.

…. You see, as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You under­stand? You keep see­ing the same thing over and over again… so you get a lit­tle bit tired of life. So as death comes, you almost say, okay, baby, it’s time, it’s good.

The answer puts the inter­view­er in mind of Mal­colm Lowry’s Under the Vol­cano, which sends Bukows­ki on one of his sig­na­ture cranky cri­tiques, also an intro­duc­tion to his the­o­ry of prose, which can be summed up in just three syl­la­bles, “BIM BIM BIM!”—the sound he makes to show the “quick­ness” of a well-writ­ten line. Good writ­ing needs “pace,” “life,” and “sun­light.” “Each line,” he says, “must be full of a deli­cious lit­tle juice, they must be full of pow­er, they must make you like to turn a page, bim bim bim!” Writ­ing like Lowry’s, he says, is “too leisure­ly.” There’s too much set­up, too lit­tle pay­off.

He may seem unfair to Lowry, but most writ­ers bore Bukows­ki. After pages of tedious buildup, “when they get to the grand emo­tion, there isn’t any,” he says. Bukows­ki has nev­er been one for sub­tle­ty, but no one can say his writ­ing lacks  “juice” or grand emo­tion. On the con­trary, he endears him­self to so many aspir­ing writ­ers (or aspir­ing male writ­ers, in any case) because his poet­ry and prose are so elec­tri­fy­ing­ly alive. He had a lim­it­ed range of sub­jects, most­ly con­fined to his own thoughts, feel­ings, and drunk­en mis­ad­ven­tures. Yet the voice that car­ries us through his vio­lent­ly fun­ny tales and rever­ies, wicked and maudlin and ten­der by turns, seems capa­ble of lim­it­less inven­tion.

“Writ­ing must nev­er be bor­ing,” says Bukows­ki. He set a high bar, and he met it. As writ­ers, we need not live his life to do the same. But we must each be “tru­ly alive” in our own way to make our lines go bim bim bim. “Each line,” he says, “must be an enti­ty unto itself.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

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

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Joyce Carol Oates Teaches a New Online Course on the Art of the Short Story

in Literature, Online Courses, Writing | August 7th, 2019

How on Earth does Joyce Car­ol Oates do it? Since her debut 56 years ago she has put out 58 nov­els, not to men­tion her poet­ry, plays, non­fic­tion, diaries, and thou­sands — lit­er­al­ly thou­sands — of short sto­ries. (In recent years, she’s also writ­ten no small num­ber of tweets.) But though she’s spent decades with the adjec­tive pro­lif­ic attached to her name, none of us would know her name in the first place if her work had noth­ing more dis­tinc­tive about it than its sheer vol­ume. No mat­ter how much a writer writes, all is for naught if that writ­ing does­n’t make an impact. The ques­tion of how to make that impact, in sev­er­al sens­es of the word, lies at the heart of Oates’ new online course offered through Mas­ter­class.

“The most pow­er­ful writ­ing often comes from con­fronting taboos,” Oates says in the course’s trail­er above. “As a writer, if one can face the dark­est ele­ments in one­self, and the things that are secret, you have such a feel­ing of pow­er.” The truth of that comes through in any of Oates’ nov­els, but also in her short­er works of fic­tion, even the ear­ly sto­ries that make up her very first book, 1963’s col­lec­tion By the North Gate.

We might call her one of the writ­ers whose short sto­ries offer dis­til­la­tions of their sen­si­bil­i­ties, and so it makes sense that her Mas­ter­class focus­es on “the Art of the Short Sto­ry.” Its four­teen lessons cov­er such aspects of short-sto­ry writ­ing as draft­ing, revis­ing, and shar­ing; observ­ing the world with a jour­nal; and of course, “explor­ing taboo and dark­ness.”

Oates draws exam­ples from her own vast body of work, of course, includ­ing her much-reprint­ed short sto­ry “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” But she also exam­ines the writ­ing of such pre­de­ces­sors as Vir­ginia Woolf, William Car­los Williams, and Ernest Hem­ing­way, as well as sto­ries writ­ten by the two stu­dents who appear in the class videos. This is as close as most of us will ever get to being work­shopped by Joyce Car­ol Oates, and if that appeals to you, you can take her Mas­ter­class by sign­ing up for a All-Access pass to every course on the site (includ­ing cours­es taught by nov­el­ists like Mar­garet Atwood, Judy Blume, and Neil Gaiman). But be warned that, how­ev­er daunt­ing the prospect of tap­ping into one’s own dark mem­o­ries and for­bid­den thoughts, the ques­tion of how Oates does it has anoth­er, poten­tial­ly more fright­en­ing answer: eight hours a day.

You can sign up for Oates’ course here.

FYI: 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:

The Writ­ing Life of Joyce Car­ol Oates

Mar­garet Atwood Offers a New Online Class on Cre­ative Writ­ing

How to Write a Best­selling Page Turn­er: Learn from The Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown’s New Mas­ter­class

Judy Blume Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Writ­ing

The Artists’ and Writ­ers’ Cook­book Col­lects Recipes From T.C. Boyle, Mari­na Abramović, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

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

in Literature, Writing | July 26th, 2019

Among all nov­el­ists cur­rent­ly work­ing in the Eng­lish lan­guage, how many pay the atten­tion to style Mar­tin Amis does? And among all nov­el­ists who have ever worked in the Eng­lish lan­guage, how many pay the atten­tion to style Vladimir Nabokov did? No won­der that the for­mer yields to none in his appre­ci­a­tion for the lat­ter. “Amis has always want­ed to see Nabokov as some­one resem­bling his own crit­i­cal self — essen­tial­ly, a ‘cel­e­bra­tor,’ a man whose dark­ness and sever­i­ties have been over­stat­ed,” write The New York­er’s Thomas Mal­lon. Amis has explic­it­ly tak­en note of “Nabokov’s dis­dain for sym­pa­thet­ic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, and also of his belief that artis­tic effect was every­thing, the descrip­tor more impor­tant than the described.”

Nabokov’s dec­la­ra­tion that “for me, ‘style’ is mat­ter,” Mal­lon writes, “remains almost fear­ful­ly thrilling to Amis.” And it is with one of Nabokov’s prin­ci­ples on style that Amis begins in the Big Think video above. “There is only one school of writ­ing,” he quotes Nabokov as writ­ing. “That of tal­ent.” You can’t teach tal­ent, of course, “but what you can do is instill cer­tain prin­ci­ples,” one of them being “the impor­tance of ugly rep­e­ti­tion.” But then, “rep­e­ti­tion has its uses, and any­thing is bet­ter than try­ing to avoid rep­e­ti­tion through what they call ‘ele­gant vari­a­tion’ ” — the use, which Amis dis­miss­es as point­less, of “using a dif­fer­ent word when there’s no change in mean­ing.”

Most of us com­mit ele­gant vari­a­tion with the­saurus in hand; hence, it would seem, that par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence book’s rep­u­ta­tion as the tool of sec­ond-class writ­ers and worse. But Amis him­self uses the the­saurus, and heav­i­ly, as a means of “avoid­ing rep­e­ti­tion of pre­fix­es and suf­fix­es” — he cites Nabokov’s chang­ing the title of Invi­ta­tion to an Exe­cu­tion to Invi­ta­tion to a Behead­ing — “as well as rhymes and half-rhymes, unin­ten­tion­al allit­er­a­tion, et cetera.” Peo­ple assume “the­saurus­es are there so you can look up a fan­cy word for ‘big,’ ” when in fact they serve their true pur­pose when you come to a point in a sen­tence “where you’re unhap­py with the word you’ve cho­sen not because of its mean­ing, but because of its rhythm. You may want a mono­syl­la­ble for this con­cept, or you may want a tri­syl­la­ble.”

A writer like Amis, or indeed Nabokov (who learned Eng­lish after his native Russ­ian), will also “make sure they’re not vis­it­ing an indeco­rum on the word’s deriva­tion.” This requires noth­ing more than the hum­ble dic­tio­nary, to check, for exam­ple, whether dilap­i­dat­ed can describe a hedge as well as a build­ing. (It can’t, and Amis explains why.) “When you look up a word in the dic­tio­nary, you own it in a way you did­n’t before,” says Amis, who esti­mates that he does it him­self a dozen times a day. “It’s very labor-inten­sive. It takes a long time, some­times, to get your sen­tence right rhyth­mi­cal­ly, and to clear the main words in it from mis­use. And all you’re win­ning is the respect of oth­er seri­ous writ­ers. But I think any amount of effort is worth it for that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg, His Most Famous Stu­dent, To Care Deeply About Writ­ing

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

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)

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

in Archives, Literature, Writing | July 24th, 2019

I first came to Jane Austen pre­pared to dis­like her, reared as I had been to think of good fic­tion as social­ly trans­gres­sive, exper­i­men­tal, full of heavy, life-or-death moral con­flicts and exis­ten­tial­ist anti-heroes; of extremes of dread and sor­row or alien­at­ed extremes of their lack. Austen’s char­ac­ters seemed too perky and per­fect, too cir­cum­scribed and whole­some, too untrou­bled by inner despair or out­er calami­ty to offer much in the way of inter­est or exam­ple.

This is an opin­ion shared by more per­cep­tive read­ers than myself, includ­ing Char­lotte Bron­të, who called Pride and Prej­u­dice “an accu­rate daguerreo­type por­trait of a com­mon­place face.” Bron­të “dis­liked [Austen] exceed­ing­ly,” writes author Mary Stolz in an intro­duc­tion to Emma. The author of Jane Eyre pro­nounced that “Miss Austen is only shrewd and obser­vant,” where a nov­el­ist like George Sand is “saga­cious and pro­found.”

A cur­so­ry read­ing of Austen can seem to con­firm Brontë’s faint praise. Con­sid­er the first descrip­tion of her hero­ine match­mak­er, Emma:

Emma Wood­house, hand­some, clever, and rich, with a com­fort­able home and hap­py dis­po­si­tion, seemed to unite some of the best bless­ings of exis­tence, and had lived near­ly twen­ty-one years in the world with very lit­tle to dis­tress or vex her.

No great, shock­ing dis­as­ters befall Emma. She is buf­fet­ed nei­ther by war nor pover­ty, crime, dis­ease, oppres­sion or any oth­er essen­tial­ly dra­mat­ic con­flict. She ends the nov­el join­ing hands in mar­riage with charm­ing gen­tle­man farmer Mr. Knight­ly, con­tent, maybe ever-after, in “per­fect hap­pi­ness.”

Rarely if ever in Austen do we find the tor­ments, spir­i­tu­al striv­ings, sub­lime and grotesque imag­in­ings, pro­to-sci­ence-fic­tion, and world-his­tor­i­cal con­scious­ness of con­tem­po­raries like William Blake, Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, or Mary Shel­ley. Austen is “famous,” writes Stolz, “for hav­ing lived through the peri­od of the French Rev­o­lu­tion with­out ever men­tion­ing it in her writ­ings.”

To see this as a cri­tique, how­ev­er, is to seri­ous­ly mis­judge her. “She did not deal in rev­o­lu­tions of this order. Not a trav­eled woman, she wrote only of what she knew”: life in Eng­lish coun­try vil­lages, the tra­vails of “love and mon­ey,” as she put it, the every­day long­ings, cour­te­sies, and dis­cour­te­sies that make up the major­i­ty of our every­day lives.

We can see Austen doing just that in her own hand at the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion. A col­lec­tion of scanned man­u­scripts from the Bodleian, British Library, Pier­pont Mor­gan Library, pri­vate col­lec­tors, and King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, this project “rep­re­sents every stage of her writ­ing career and a vari­ety of phys­i­cal states: work­ing drafts, fair copies, and hand­writ­ten pub­li­ca­tions for pri­vate cir­cu­la­tion.”

This is pri­mar­i­ly a resource for schol­ars; much of this work has been pub­lished in print­ed edi­tions, includ­ing the Juve­nil­ia (read some of that writ­ing here) and unfin­ished drafts like The Wat­sons and her last, uncom­plet­ed, nov­el, San­di­ton. (One still-in-print 1975 edi­tion col­lects the three unfin­ished nov­els found at the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion). Each dig­i­tal edi­tion of the man­u­script includes a head note on the tex­tu­al his­to­ry, prove­nance, and phys­i­cal struc­ture, as well as a tran­scrip­tion of the text. There is also an option to view a “diplo­mat­ic edi­tion” that tran­scribes the text with all of Austen’s cor­rec­tions and addi­tions.

Yet any Austen fan will appre­ci­ate see­ing her wit­ty, inci­sive style change and take shape in her own neat script. In an age of super­heroes, his­tor­i­cal and fan­ta­sy epics, and dystopi­an fan­tasies, we are beset by “the big Bow-Wow strain,” as Wal­ter Scott self-effac­ing­ly called his own nov­els. In Austen’s writ­ing, we find what Scott described as an “exquis­ite touch which ren­ders com­mon­place things and char­ac­ters inter­est­ing from the truth of the descrip­tion and the sen­ti­ment.” She wraps her truths in wicked irony and a satir­i­cal voice, but they are truths we rec­og­nize as wise and com­pas­sion­ate in her domes­tic dra­mas and our own.

Austen knew well that her set­tings and char­ac­ters were lim­it­ed. She made no apolo­gies for it and clear­ly needn’t have. “Three or four fam­i­lies in a coun­try vil­lage,” she wrote to her niece Anna, “is the very thing to work on.” She also knew well the uni­ver­sal ten­den­cies that blind us to the vari­ety found with­in the every­day, whether our every­day is a sleepy coun­try vil­lage life or a tech-laden, 21st-cen­tu­ry city.

She almost seems to sigh weari­ly in Emma when she observes, “human nature is so well dis­posed toward those who are in inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tions” … so much so that we fail to notice what’s going on all around us all the time. She wrote nei­ther for mon­ey nor fame, and her work wasn’t even pub­lished with her name until after her death in July 1817, but she has since become fierce­ly beloved for the very qual­i­ties Bron­të dis­par­aged.

Austen didn’t miss a thing, which makes her nov­els as can­ny and insight­ful (and big-screen and fan-fic­tion adapt­able) as when they were first writ­ten over two-hun­dred years ago. Enter the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

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

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Man­u­scripts: Before the Word Proces­sor & White-Out

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

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Anton Chekhov’s Six Rules For Writing Fiction

in Writing | July 3rd, 2019

Whether due to inse­cu­ri­ty, inex­pe­ri­ence, or just intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, writ­ers of fic­tion can some­times priv­i­lege sound­ing smart over con­nect­ing with their read­ers. The result is the dread­ed “infor­ma­tion dump,” an attempt to include every­thing: every­thing, that is, but that which makes fic­tion com­pelling: minute­ly detailed descrip­tions of char­ac­ters we care about; sharply observed sit­u­a­tions that move us; moral com­plex­i­ty that feels earned and gen­uine…

All qual­i­ties that might fall under the adjec­tive “Chekhov­ian.”

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, coun­try doc­tor and mas­ter­ful short sto­ry writer, put him­self through med­ical school by writ­ing fic­tion read­ers could not put down. He has since become a stan­dard for real­ist concision—the short sto­ry ana­logue to Gus­tave Flaubert’s mas­tery of the nov­el form.

And like Flaubert, Chekhov mas­tered his art by plac­ing strict lim­its on him­self. These he out­lined in an 1886 let­ter to his broth­er Alek­san­dr in a con­cise six-point list, which you’ll find below.

  1. Absence of lengthy ver­biage of polit­i­cal-social-eco­nom­ic nature;
  2. Total objec­tiv­i­ty;
  3. Truth­ful descrip­tion of per­sons and objects;
  4. Extreme brevi­ty;
  5. Audac­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty: flee the stereo­type;
  6. Com­pas­sion

Many of these pre­scrip­tions can sound like the CIA-approved rules infor­mal­ly enforced by the 20th-cen­tu­ry Iowa Writer’s Work­shop. One can draw a line from Chekhov to Ray­mond Carv­er, Flan­nery O’Connor, John Updike, and oth­er writ­ers like­ly to have appeared in The New York­er. But many writ­ers besides Chekhov have com­plained of over­ly ver­bose, opin­ion­at­ed fic­tion.

19th cen­tu­ry writer Hen­ry James dis­par­aged what he called the “large loose bag­gy mon­sters” of Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky and oth­er ser­i­al nov­el­ists, for exam­ple. Anoth­er nov­el­ist, Jay McIn­er­ney takes a phrase from Renais­sance schol­ar Wal­ter Pater to describe the brevi­ty of the short sto­ry: the form, he writes, cre­ates a “hard, gem­like flame.” This seems to be what Chekhov strove for in his mature work.

But three years ear­li­er, he had per­fect­ed a very dif­fer­ent kind of sto­ry, and issued a very dif­fer­ent list of pre­scrip­tions to his broth­er. In 1883, Chekhov advised that if Alek­san­dr wished to get pub­lished in the mag­a­zine Frag­ments, he should observe the fol­low­ing: “1. The short­er, the bet­ter; 2. A bit of ide­ol­o­gy and being up to date is most à pro­pos; 3. Car­i­ca­ture is just fine, but igno­rance of civ­il ser­vice ranks and of the sea­sons is strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed.”

We can see the author’s not­ed con­cern for accu­ra­cy, but not the ulti­mate and most con­cise item on his mature list: Com­pas­sion, a qual­i­ty that eclipses typol­o­gy and ide­ol­o­gy. Chekhov may not always have adhered close­ly to some of his own rules, as ethno­graph­ic writer Kirin Narayan shows. After all, who can achieve “total objec­tiv­i­ty”? But “embed­ded” in this ide­al is “the recog­ni­tion” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, “that no depic­tion of real­i­ty is real­is­tic unless it includes an empath­ic account of all per­spec­tives.”

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Kurt Von­negut Offers 8 Tips on How to Write Good Short Sto­ries (and Amus­ing­ly Graphs the Shapes Those Sto­ries Can Take)

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Sound Writ­ing Advice: Tips You Can Apply to Your Own Work

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

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Steven Pinker’s 13 Rules for Good Writing

in Writing | March 27th, 2019

Pho­to by Rose Lin­coln, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

What is good writ­ing? The ques­tion requires con­text. Each type of writ­ing has its norms. Some guide­lines apply across disciplines—consult your Strunk and White or any of the hun­dreds of hand­books rec­om­mend­ing strong verbs and min­i­mal use of pas­sive voice. Still, you wouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly put the ques­tion to an exper­i­men­tal poet if your con­cern is infor­ma­tive writ­ing (though maybe you should). Maybe bet­ter to ask a schol­ar who writes clear prose.

Har­vard Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy Steven Pinker could serve as such a guide, giv­en the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his books with the read­ing pub­lic (their debat­able mer­its for cer­tain crit­ics aside). Luck­i­ly for his readers—and those gen­er­al­ly seek­ing to bet­ter their writing—Pinker has offered his ser­vices free on Twit­ter with a 13-point list of rules. Unlike­ly to cause con­tro­ver­sy among Eng­lish teach­ers, Pinker’s guide­lines enact the suc­cinct­ness they rec­om­mend.

Rants about the unin­tel­li­gi­bil­i­ty of aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing have become genre all their own, but jar­gon and spe­cial­ized ter­mi­nol­o­gy have their place in cer­tain nich­es, and there’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with dif­fi­cul­ty. Read­ers can argue amongst them­selves about whether some kinds of writ­ing are need­less­ly over­com­pli­cat­ed. (Fair­ly or not, post­struc­tural­ist French philoso­phers take a beat­ing on this score, but spend some time with Kant or Hegel and see how eas­i­ly you breeze through.)

Yet most of us are not pro­fes­sion­al philoso­phers, sci­en­tists, or the­o­rists writ­ing only for col­leagues or coter­ies. When we write, we want to com­mu­ni­cate clear­ly: to inform, per­suade, and even enter­tain a gen­er­al read­er­ship. In order to do that, we need to min­i­mize abstrac­tions, appeal to the sens­es, clear away clut­ter and make con­nec­tions for our read­ers. Revi­sion is key. Read­ing aloud gives the ear a chance to weed out clum­si­ness the eye can miss. All of these trust­ed strate­gies appear in Pinker’s list.

One point Pinker adds to the usu­al pre­scrip­tions has a suit­ably psy­cho­log­i­cal bent, and an odd­ly Bib­li­cal-sound­ing name: the “Curse of Knowl­edge.” Know­ing too much about a sub­ject can make it “hard to imag­ine what it’s like not to know it.” For those who want to know more about clear, con­cise writ­ing, or who need the inevitable refresh­er from which even the knowl­edge­able ben­e­fit, see Pinker’s 13 rules below or on Twit­ter.

  1. Reverse-engi­neer what you read. If it feels like good writ­ing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why? 
  2. Prose is a win­dow onto the world. Let your read­ers see what you are see­ing by using visu­al, con­crete lan­guage.
  3. Don’t go meta. Min­i­mize con­cepts about con­cepts, like “approach, assump­tion, con­cept, con­di­tion, con­text, frame­work, issue, lev­el, mod­el, per­spec­tive, process, range, role, strat­e­gy, ten­den­cy,” and “vari­able.”
  4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appear­ance.”
  5. Beware of the Curse of Knowl­edge: when you know some­thing, it’s hard to imag­ine what it’s like not to know it. Min­i­mize acronyms & tech­ni­cal terms. Use “for exam­ple” lib­er­al­ly. Show a draft around, & pre­pare to learn that what’s obvi­ous to you may not be obvi­ous to any­one else.
  6. Omit need­less words (Will Strunk was right about this).
  7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).
  8. Old infor­ma­tion at the begin­ning of the sen­tence, new infor­ma­tion at the end.
  9. Save the heav­i­est for last: a com­plex phrase should go at the end of the sen­tence.
  10. Prose must cohere: read­ers must know how each sen­tence is relat­ed to the pre­ced­ing one. If it’s not obvi­ous, use “that is, for exam­ple, in gen­er­al, on the oth­er hand, nev­er­the­less, as a result, because, nonethe­less,” or “despite.”
  11. Revise sev­er­al times with the sin­gle goal of improv­ing the prose.
  12. Read it aloud.
  13. Find the best word, which is not always the fan­ci­est word. Con­sult a dic­tio­nary with usage notes, and a the­saurus.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steven Pinker: “Dear Human­ists, Sci­ence is Not Your Ene­my”

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

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

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

in Books, Literature, Writing | March 14th, 2019

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 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, Wolff, 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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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 Reads from As I Lay Dying

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

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Alice in Wonderland, Hamlet, and A Christmas Carol Written in Shorthand (Circa 1919)

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 27th, 2019

For hun­dreds of years before the reg­u­lar use of dic­ta­tion machines, word proces­sors, and com­put­ers, many thou­sands of court records, cor­re­spon­dence, jour­nal­ism, and so on cir­cu­lat­ed in trans­la­tion. All of these texts were orig­i­nal­ly in their native lan­guage, but they were tran­scribed in a dif­fer­ent writ­ing sys­tem, then trans­lat­ed back into the stan­dard orthog­ra­phy, by stenog­ra­phers using var­i­ous kinds of short­hand. In Eng­lish, this meant that a mess of irreg­u­lar, pho­net­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal spellings turned into a stream­lined, order­ly sym­bol­ic sys­tem, impen­e­tra­ble to any­one who had­n’t stud­ied it thor­ough­ly.

I do not know the rates of accu­ra­cy in short­hand writ­ing or trans­la­tion. Nor do I know how many orig­i­nal short­hand man­u­scripts still exist for comparison’s sake. But for cen­turies, short­hand sys­tems were used to record lec­tures, let­ters, and inter­views, and to write edicts, essays, arti­cles, etc., in Impe­r­i­al Chi­na, ancient Greece and Rome, and mod­ern Europe, North Amer­i­ca, and Japan.

The prac­tice reached a peak in the late nine­teenth and ear­ly 20th cen­turies, when stenog­ra­phy became a growth indus­try. Jack El-Hai at Won­ders and Mar­vels explains.

A cen­tu­ry ago, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple around the world reg­u­lar­ly used short­hand. Sec­re­taries, stenog­ra­phers, court reporters, jour­nal­ists and oth­ers depend­ed on the elab­o­rate short­hand sys­tems that Isaac Pit­man and John Robert Gregg devel­oped in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and count­less schools and pub­lish­ers seized the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty to train them. Tal­ent­ed prac­ti­tion­ers could write at speeds up to 280 words per minute.

The texts of sys­tems like Pit­man and Gregg’s “grew increas­ing­ly com­plex,” then increas­ing­ly sim­pli­fied dur­ing lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. “In 1903, the pub­lish­ers of the Gregg method released the first nov­el entire­ly ren­dered in shorthand—an 87-page edi­tion of Let­ters from a Self-Made Mer­chant to His Son by George Horace Latimer.”

More lit­er­a­ture in short­hand fol­lowed, mark­ing the Gregg sys­tem’s most baroque peri­od. Ten years lat­er saw the pub­li­ca­tion of Wash­ing­ton Irving’s The Leg­end of Sleepy Hol­low, then, in 1918, with Alice in Won­der­land, Ham­let, and A Christ­mas Car­ol, and sto­ries like Guy de Maupassant’s “The Dia­mond Neck­lace,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Mael­ström.” All of this lit­er­ary short­hand is writ­ten in what is known as “Pre-Anniver­sary” Gregg, which con­tained the largest num­ber of sym­bols and devices. In 1929, a year-late “Anniver­sary Edi­tion” began a peri­od of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion that cul­mi­nat­ed in 1988, a cen­tu­ry after the system’s first pub­li­ca­tion.

The lit­er­a­ture pub­lished in Gregg short­hand joined in a his­to­ry of short­hand “used by (or to pre­serve the work of) every­one from Cicero to Luther to Shake­speare to Pepys,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review. And yet, the “util­i­tar­i­an func­tion of short­hand sits a lit­tle odd­ly per­haps with lit­er­a­ture, giv­en the nov­el or the poem is a form asso­ci­at­ed with a dif­fer­ent realm: that of leisure.” One should not have to train in a spe­cial­ized phone­mic orthog­ra­phy to read and enjoy Alice in Won­der­land, but, on the off chance that you did so train, there is at least much enjoy­able and edi­fy­ing mate­r­i­al with which to prac­tice, or show off, your skills.

It would, I main­tain, be a fas­ci­nat­ing exer­cise to com­pare trans­la­tions of these well-known works from the short­hand with their orig­i­nals man­u­scripts writ­ten in the pho­net­ic chaos of the Eng­lish we rec­og­nize. Whether or not you have the skill to under­take this exper­i­ment, you can see many of these Gregg’s short­hand edi­tions here and at the Inter­net Archive. Just click on the embeds above to see larg­er images and view and down­load a vari­ety of for­mats.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More 

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

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