10 Rules for Writers by Etgar Keret, the Israeli Master of the Short and Strange

in Books, Creativity, Literature, Writing | July 13th, 2015

Etgar Keret, above, is a best selling author and award-winning filmmaker with the soul of a teenage zine publisher. He’s a master of the strange and short who plays by his own rules. This sounds like a recipe for outsider status but Keret frequently pops up in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s This American Life.

The child of Holocaust survivors told Tikkun that he began writing stories as a way out of his miserable existence as a stuttering 19-year-old soldier in the Israeli army. This may explain why he’s so generous with young fans, handing his stories over to them to interpret in short films and animations.

When Rookie, a website for teenage girls, invited him to share ten writing tips, he playfully obliged. It’s worth noting that he refrained from prescribing something that’s a staple of other authors’ tip lists — the adoption of a daily writing practice. As he told the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

For me, the term “writing routine” sounds like an oxymoron. It is a bit like saying “having-a-once-in-a-lifetime-insight-which-makes-you-want-to burst-into-tears routine.”

With no further ado, here are his ten rules for writers, along with a liberal sprinkling of some of my favorite Keret stories.

1. Make sure you enjoy writing.

You won’t find Keret comparing his chosen profession to opening a vein. As he told Rookie:

Writing is a way to live another life…be grateful for the opportunity to expand the scope of your life.

2. Love your characters.

…though few will ever seem as lovable as the girl in Goran Dukic’s charming animation of Keret’s story “What Do We Have In Our Pockets?” below.

3. When you’re writing, you don’t owe anything to anyone.

Don’t equate loving your characters with treating them nicely. See Keret’s story “Fungus.”

4. Always start from the middle.

This is perhaps Keret’s most conventional tip, though his writing shows he’s anything but conventional when it comes to locating that middle. His novella, Kneller’s Happy Campers (on which the film Wristcutters: A Love Story, starring Tom Waits, was based) manages to start at the beginning, middle and end.

5. Try not to know how it ends.

At the very least, be prepared to dig yourself out to a different reality, like the narrator in Keret’s very short story “Mystique,” read below by actor Willem Dafoe.

6. Don’t use anything just because “that’s how it always is.”

Here, Keret is referring to what he termed “the shrine of form” in an interview with his great admirer, broadcaster Ira Glass, but his content is similarly unfettered. If your writing’s become bogged down by reality, try introducing a magic fish who’s fluent in everything, as in “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?,” read by author Gary Shteyngart, below.

7. Write like yourself.

Leave the critics holding the bag on comparisons to Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen, Lydia Davis, Amos Oz, Donald Barthelme…

8. Make sure you’re all alone in the room when you write.

um…Etgar? Does this mean I have to give up my coffice?

9. Let people who like what you write encourage you.

Nerts to underminers, frenemies, withering internal editors, and deliberately hateful reviewers!

10. Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me).

Read the Rookie interview in which Keret expands on his rules.

via Rookie

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Neil Gaiman & Famous Friends Read Aloud the Entirety of Coraline (and The Graveyard Book Too)

in Audio Books, Books, K-12, Literature | July 10th, 2015

One of the many pleasures of hearing a children’s author reading his or her own work is their overwhelming lack of vocal sentiment. When my children were young, I always opted for the horse’s mouth, over the more histrionic characterizations of a hired narrator, regardless of what sitcom or Broadway play he or she may have starred in. It might have taken author E.B. White 17 takes to lay down a track for Charlotte’s Web’s titular character’s death scene, but he eventually achieved the healthy remove that lets the listener—not the reader—wallow in the valley of deep emotions.

Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is not a weepie, like White’s best loved work. Instead, it revels in a sort of understated creepiness en route to the horrifically bizarre. It’s a tone his fellow literary celebs are blissfully well equipped to deliver, reading chapters aloud in honor of the book’s 10th anniversary. You can see them read all of the chapters here and also above and below.

Gaiman himself bookends the proceedings by claiming the first (above) and final chapter. Lucky that. One shudders to think of the myriad ways in which a narrator of cutesier sensibilities could have screwed up phrases like “oompah oompah” and “squidy brown toadstools” (thus blighting the entire book).

I conceive of these readings as a multiple narrator audiobook because the performers are reading, rather than attempting to act out the text in their hands, but really it’s more of a video storytime. Gaiman is definitely on point in front of the camera—his large brown eyes, prominent proboscis and stringy sternocleidomastoid muscles adding to the proceedings.

Sandwiched in between the master’s performances, you will find such luminaries as authors R.L. Stine, John Hodgman, and Daniel “Lemony Snicket” Handler, framed so that he has no head. Former child star Fairuza Balk would’ve made a gimcrack Coraline back in the day, but her rendition of the book’s penultimate chapter suggests that she’s even better suited to the role of Coraline’s “Other Mother,” or rather her disembodied hand. Bedlam, indeed.

Listen to the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the book in its entirety here.

Should that leave you wanting more, Harper Collins has compiled a stem to stern playlist of Gaiman reading 2008’s The Graveyard Book, culled from various videos of the author on tour. You can watch it above, or find it in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist

in Animation, Literature | July 9th, 2015

If the impressionistic animation style of psychologist, writer, and filmmaker Ilana Simons’ “About Haruki Murakami”—a short video introduction to the jazz bar owning, marathon running, Japanese novelist—puts you in mind of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, then the elliptical, lucid dream narration may do so even more. “He didn’t use too many words,” Simons tells us. “Too many words is kinda… too many words. Someone’s always losing their voice. Someone’s hearing is acute. Haruki Murakami.” Like Roger Ebert said of Linklater’s film, Simons’ ode to Murakami—and the novelist’s work itself—is “philosophical and playful at the same time.”

Simons reads us Murakami’s existentialist account of how he became a novelist, at age 29, after having an epiphany at a baseball game: “The idea struck me,” he says, “I could write a novel…. I could do it.” And he did, sitting down every night after working the bar he owned with his wife, writing by hand and drinking beer. “Before that,” he has said in an interview with singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding, “I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.” And it’s true. Besides suddenly deciding to become a novelist, “out of the blue” at almost 30, then suddenly becoming an avid marathon runner at age 33, Murakami’s life was pretty unremarkable.

It’s not entirely surprising that he became a novelist. Both of Murakami’s parents taught Japanese literature, though he himself was not a particularly good student. But the author of such beloved books as Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore and dozens of short stories (read six free here), has mostly drawn his inspiration from outside his national tradition—from American baseball and jazz, from British invasion rock and roll, from Fitzgerald, Kafka, and Hollywood films. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on the BBC Murakami documentary below, “he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures—especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language.”

Murakami’s desire to break with norms, Simons tells us in her charming, visually accomplished animated short, is symptomatic of his “detachment” and “introspection.” Murakami “liked escape, or he just doesn’t like joining groups and investing too many words in places where words have been too often.” The thought of “organized activities,” Murakami has said, like “holding hands at a demonstration… gives me the creeps.” Murakami’s love of solitude makes him seem mysterious, “elusive,” says presenter Alan Yentob in the film above. But one of the extraordinary things about Murakami—in addition to his running a 62-mile “ultramarathon” and conquering the literary world on a whim—is just how ordinary he is in many ways. Both Simons’ increasingly surrealist, bebop-scored short and the BBC’s cool jazz-backed exploration make this contrast seem all the more remarkable. It’s Murakami’s ability to stretch and bend the ordinary world, Simons suggests near the end of her lyrical tribute, that makes his readers feel that “somehow, magically… he does something very private and intimate with their brains”

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

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How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known

in Creativity, Life, Literature, Psychology | July 8th, 2015

Image via Diego Sevilla Ruiz

A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: “A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it.” The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve such a state by walking just as well as by sitting still—and many a poet and teacher has preferred the ambulatory method.

This is equally so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the “peripatetic”—that derives from Aristotle and his contemporaries’ penchant for doing their best work while in leisurely motion. Friedrich Nietzsche, an almost fanatical walker, once wrote, “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Nietzsche’s mountain walks were athletic, but walking—Frédéric Gros maintains in his A Philosophy of Walking—is not a sport; it is “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.”

Gros discusses the centrality of walking in the lives of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, and Thoreau. Likewise, Rebecca Solnit has profiled the essential walks of literary figures such as William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Gary Snyder in her book Wanderlust, which argues for the necessity of walking in our own age, when doing so is almost entirely unnecessary most of the time. As great walkers of the past and present have made abundantly clear—anecdotally at least—we see a significant link between walking and creative thinking.

More generally, writes Ferris Jabr in The New Yorker, “the way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa.” Applying modern research methods to ancient wisdom has allowed psychologists to quantify the ways in which this happens, and to begin to explain why. Jabr summarizes the experiments of two Stanford walking researchers, Marily Oppezzo and her mentor Daniel Schwartz, who found that almost two hundred students tested showed markedly heightened creative abilities while walking. Walking, Jabr writes in poetic terms, works by “setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought.” (Hear Dr. Oppezzo discuss her study in a Minnesota public radio interview above.)

Oppezzo and Schwartz speculate, “future studies would likely determine a complex pathway that extends from the physical act of walking to physiological changes to the cognitive control of imagination.” They recognize that this discovery must also account for such variables as when one walks, and—as so many notable walkers have stressed—where. Researchers at the University of Michigan have tackled the where question in a paper titled “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature.” Their study, writes Jabr, showed that “students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets.”

One wonders what James Joyce—whose Ulysses is built almost entirely on a scaffolding of walks around Dublin—would make of this. Or Walter Benjamin, whose concept of the flâneur, an archetypal urban wanderer, derives directly from the insights of that most imaginative decadent poet, Charles Baudelaire. Classical walkers, Romantic walkers, Modernist walkers—all recognized the creative importance of this simple movement in time and space, one we work so hard to master in our first years, and sometimes lose in later life if we acquire it. Going for a walk, contemporary research confirms—a mundane activity far too easily taken for granted—may be one of the most salutary means of achieving states of enlightenment, literary, philosophical, or otherwise, whether we roam through ancient forests, over the Alps, or to the corner store.

via The New Yorker/Stanford News

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

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Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on “the Art of Writing Short Stories”

in Literature, Writing | July 3rd, 2015

For some certain romantic reasons, a segment of the English-language reading population fell in love with Roberto Bolaño in the first few years of this millennium. One invariably glimpsed Bolaño’s award-winning 1998 novel The Savage Detectives on endtables and nightstands after its translation in 2007, with or without bookmarks. When 2666—the Chilean writer’s dizzyingly enormous work on the darkest of events in 1990’s Northern Mexico—appeared, it did so posthumously, further elevating Bolaño’s literary outlaw mythos. In addition to being a hard-bitten Trotskyist nomad, Bolaño—who died of liver failure in 2003—was said to have been a heroin addict and alcoholic. Neither was the case, writes Hector Tobar in the LA Times, quoting a Mexico City-based journalist on the author: “He had a super boring daily life. It was a life built around his own writing rituals and habits.”

For all his legendary exploits as a globetrotting journalist and poet, Bolaño also seems to have built his life around reading. “Reading,” Bolaño has said, “is more important than writing.” He finds much company with this statement among fellow writers. Patti Smith, for example, who urges reading “anything by Bolaño,” could also “recommend a million” books to anyone who asks. A much shorter but still challenging list of hers reveals a deep and broad investment in literature. William S. Burroughs, who probably didn’t read Bolaño but worked in a similarly hallucinatory vein, taught a class on “Creative Reading” that was only secondarily a class on writing, filled with example after example from writer after treasured writer. The best writing advice writers can dispense, it seems, is this: Read.

Such is the approach of Bolaño himself, in a short, pithy essay on how to write short stories. He begins in a perfunctory way, almost with a sigh: “Now that I’m forty-four years old, I’m going to offer some advice on the art of writing short stories.” The advice, found in the graphic form above on The Paris Review’s Tumblr and reprinted in a non-fiction collection titled Between Parenthesis, quickly becomes exuberantly pedantic, permeating the boundaries of its neatly ordered list form with tongue moving from cheek to cheek. Does he really mean that we should read “the notable Pseudo-Longinus” on the sublime? Or to suggest—after insistent reference to several essential Latin American writers’ writers—that “with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read”? Probably. But the gist, with more than enough sincerity, is this: Read the greats, whoever they are, and read them often.

See Bolaño’s complete text here at Electric Cereal and an excerpted version below.

(1) Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.

(2) It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time.

(4) One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for these authors will never read Camilo José Cela or Francisco Umbral yet will, indeed, read Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, but in no way Cela or Umbral.

(5) I’ll repeat this once more in case it’s still not clear: don’t consider Cela or Umbral, whatsoever.

(6) A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is.

(9) The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.

(10) Give thought to point number 9. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number 9. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.

(12) Read these books and also read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century.

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

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New Archive Offers Free Access to 22,000 Literary Documents From Great British & American Writers

in Archives, Letters, Literature | June 30th, 2015

Thomas Hardy—architect, poet, and writer (above)—gave us the fierce, stormy romance Far From the Madding Crowd, currently impressing critics in a film adaptation by Thomas Vinterberg. He also gave us Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure, books whose persistently grim outlook might make them too depressing by far were it not for Hardy’s engrossing prose, unforgettable characterization, and, perhaps most importantly, unshakable sense of place. Hardy set most of his novels in a region he called Wessex, which—much like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha—is a thinly fictionalized recreation of his rural hometown of Dorchester and its surrounding counties.

Now, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, we can learn all about this ancient region in South West England, and Hardy’s transmutation of it, through Hardy’s own proof copy of a 1905 book by Frank R. Heath called Dorchester (Dorset) and its Surroundings, with revisions in Hardy’s hand. In the excerpt above, for example, from page 36 of this scholarly work, the author discusses Hardy’s use of Dorchester in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the so-called “Wessex Poems.” In the margins on the right, we see Hardy’s corrections and glosses. Though this may not seem the most exciting piece of Hardy memorabilia, for students of the author and his investment in a rural corner of England, it is indeed a treasure.

The Hardy archive also contains scans of the author’s correspondence, manuscripts and signed typescripts, and architectural drawings, like that of St. Juliot’s Church in Cornwall, above. This extensive digital Hardy collection is but one of many housed in the Ransom Center’s Project Reveal, an acronym for “Read and View English & American Literature.” Read and view you can indeed, through the intimacy of first drafts, manuscripts, personal writing, and other ephemera.

See, for example, a handwritten draft of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, in French, (excerpt above). Below, we have a handwritten list of Robert Louis Stevenson’s favorite books, and further down, a manuscript draft of Katherine Mansfield’s “Now I am a plant, a weed” from her personal poetry notebook.

Other authors included in the Project Reveal archive include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hart Crane, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and William Thackeray. The project, writes the Ransom Center in a press release, generated more than 22,000 high-resolution images, available for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction or fees” (but with attribution). The literary storehouse on display here only adds to an already essential collection of artifacts the Ransom Center houses, such as the papers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, syllabi, annotated books, and manuscripts from David Foster Wallace, scrapbooks of Harry Houdini, and the first known photograph ever taken. See a complete list of contents of the Ransom Center’s Digital Collections here, and learn more about this amazing library in the heart of Texas at their main site.

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

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Commuters Can Download Free eBooks of Russian Classics While Riding the Moscow Metro

in e-books, Literature | June 26th, 2015

Image by Zigurds Zakis

They say that Mussolini’s brand of fascism made Italy’s trains run on time. Meanwhile, it looks like Communists and Post-Communist autocrats made the morning subway ride in Russia something of a cultural experience.

As you can see below, the Soviets designed the Moscow subway stations as underground palaces, adorned with “high ceilings, stained glass, mosaics and chandeliers.” (Check out a gallery of photos here.) In more recent times, city planners opened the Dostoyevskaya subway station, a more austere station where you can see black and white mosaics of scenes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Somewhat controversially, the mosaics depict fairly violent scenes. On one wall, The Independent writes, “Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment brandishes an axe over the elderly pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister, his murder victims in the novel. Near by, a character from Demons holds a pistol to his temple.” Nothing like confronting murder and suicide on the morning commute.

If these gloomy scenes don’t sound familiar, don’t fret. Late last year, the Moscow subway system launched a pilot where Moscow subway commuters, carrying smartphones and tablets, can download over 100 classic Russian works, for free. As they shuttle from one station to another, riding on subway cars equipped with free wifi, straphangers can read texts by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Lermontov, Gogol and more. Perhaps that takes the sting out of the soaring inflation.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self (Then Read His Digital Essay, “Kafka’s Wound”)

in Literature, Travel | June 24th, 2015

“There is nothing intrinsically imaginative about the idea of ‘gold,’ nor the idea of ‘mountain,’” writes Will Self, citing an idea of the philosopher David Hume, “but join them together and you have a fantastically gleaming ‘gold mountain.’ And might not that gold mountain be the Laurenziberg in Prague? After all, it looms over contemporary Prague just as it loomed in the consciousness of Franz Kafka, whose earliest surviving narrative fragment, ‘Description of a Struggle,’ is in part an account of a phantasmagorical ascent of its slopes.”

This association comes from “Kafka’s Wound,” Will Self’s new essay in the London Review of Books — or rather, a new “digital essay” from the LRB on the BBC and Arts Council England’s new site The Space, one which takes full advantage of the multimedia future, much enthused over back in the 1990s, in which we now find ourselves. For some readers, myself included, the association of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial with Hume, the author of so many volumes fictional, nonfictional, and psychogeographical (find some in our collection of Free Philosophy eBooks), constitutes reason enough to minimize all other windows and get reading.

But Self has taken on an even more ambitious project than that: the mind-mappish interface of “Kafka’s Wound” offers a wealth of audio, video, and other textual material to supplement the experience of the main text, all of which connects in some way to the essay’s subject: Will Self’s “personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story ‘A Country Doctor’ (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.” Self’s own site describes the essay as “ ‘through composed’ with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers,” with more of that content to come through July.

The environment internet, which facilitates our natural tendency to drift from subject to at least semi-related subject with an addictive vengeance, encourages associational thinking. But so do cities, as a psychogeographer like Will Self knows full well. And so part of this rich literary investigation takes the form of an hourlong documentary (click here or the image above to view), in which Self takes a walking tour of Kafka’s Prague, seeking out the writer’s “genius loci,” the sites that gave settings to the milestones of his life and shape to his artistic and intellectual sensibilities. He also takes the opportunity to do a Kafka reading right there in Kafka’s hometown. It’s one thing to read Kafka with the Laurenziberg in mind, but still quite another to do it with the Laurenziberg in sight.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

10 Rules for Writers by Etgar Keret, the Israeli Master of the Short and Strange

Neil Gaiman & Famous Friends Read Aloud the Entirety of Coraline (and The Graveyard Book Too)

A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist

How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known

Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on “the Art of Writing Short Stories”

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Commuters Can Download Free eBooks of Russian Classics While Riding the Moscow Metro

Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self (Then Read His Digital Essay, “Kafka’s Wound”)

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