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

in Literature, Writing | July 17th, 2018

You can’t talk about Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry with­out talk­ing about Kurt Von­negut. And since so many well-known writ­ers today imbibed his influ­ence at one point or anoth­er, you’d have to men­tion him when talk­ing about 21st-cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture as well. Despite so ful­ly inhab­it­ing his time, not least by wicked­ly lam­poon­ing it, the author of Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle, and Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons also had a few ten­den­cies that put him ahead of his time. He worked won­ders with the short sto­ry, a form in whose hey­day he began his writ­ing career, but he also had a knack for what would become the most social media-friend­ly of all forms, the list.

In the video above, those abil­i­ties con­verge to pro­duce Von­negut’s eight bul­let points for good short-sto­ry writ­ing:

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

In the short lec­ture above Von­negut gets more tech­ni­cal, sketch­ing out the shapes that sto­ries, short or long, can take. On his chalk­board he draws two axes, the hor­i­zon­tal rep­re­sent­ing time and the ver­ti­cal rep­re­sent­ing the pro­tag­o­nist’s hap­pi­ness. In one pos­si­ble sto­ry the pro­tag­o­nist begins slight­ly hap­pi­er than aver­age, gets into trou­ble (a down­ward plunge in the sto­ry’s curve), and then gets out of it again (return­ing the curve to a high­er point of hap­pi­ness than where it began). “Peo­ple love that sto­ry,” Von­negut says. “They nev­er get sick of it.” Anoth­er sto­ry starts on an “aver­age day” with an “aver­age per­son not expect­ing any­thing to hap­pen.” Then that aver­age per­son “finds some­thing won­der­ful” (with a con­cur­rent upward curve), then los­es it (back down), then finds it again (back up).

The third and most com­pli­cat­ed curve rep­re­sents “the most pop­u­lar sto­ry in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.” It begins down toward the bot­tom of the hap­pi­ness axis, with a moth­er­less young girl whose father has “remar­ried a vile-tem­pered ugly women with two nasty daugh­ters.” But a fairy god­moth­er vis­its and bestows a vari­ety of gifts upon the girl, each one caus­ing a step­wise rise in her hap­pi­ness curve. That night she attends a ball where she dances with a prince, bring­ing the curve to its peak before it plunges back to the bot­tom at the stroke of mid­night, when the fairy god­moth­er’s mag­i­cal gifts expire. In order to bring the curve back up, the prince must use the glass slip­per she acci­den­tal­ly left behind at the ball to — oh, you’ve heard this one before?

Von­negut first explored the idea of sto­ry shapes in his mas­ter’s the­sis, reject­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go “because it was so sim­ple and looked like too much fun.” Clear­ly that did­n’t stop him from con­tin­u­ing to think about and exper­i­ment with those shapes all through­out his career. He would also keep clar­i­fy­ing his oth­er ideas about writ­ing and lit­er­a­ture by explain­ing them in a vari­ety of set­tings. He assigned term papers that can still teach you how to read like a writer, he appeared on tele­vi­sion dis­pens­ing advice to aspi­rants to the craft, and he even pub­lished arti­cles on how to write with style (in pub­li­ca­tions like the Insti­tute of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ics Engi­neers’ jour­nal at that). Nobody could, or should try to, write just like Kurt Von­negut, but all of us who write at all could do well to give our craft the kind of thought he did.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Gives Advice to Aspir­ing Writ­ers in a 1991 TV Inter­view

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

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

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

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

Kurt Von­negut Urges Young Peo­ple to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Margaret Atwood Teaching an Online Class on Creative Writing

in Education, Literature, Writing | July 12th, 2018

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.

The prob­lem of dystopi­an fic­tion is this: quite often the worst future cre­ative writ­ers can imag­ine is exact­ly the kind of present that has already been inflict­ed on others—by colo­nial­ism, dic­ta­tor­ship, geno­ci­dal war, slav­ery, theoc­ra­cy, abject pover­ty, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, etc. Mil­lions all over the world have suf­fered under these con­di­tions, but many read­ers fail to rec­og­nize dystopi­an nov­els as depict­ing exist­ing evils because they hap­pen, or have hap­pened, to peo­ple far away in space and time. Of course, Mar­garet Atwood under­stands this prin­ci­ple. The night­mares she has writ­ten about in nov­els like The Handmaid’s Tale have all already come to pass, she tells us.

In the pro­mo video above for her Mas­ter­class on Cre­ative Writ­ing start­ing this fall (it’s now open), Atwood says, “when I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, noth­ing went into it that had not hap­pened in real life some­where at some time. The rea­son I made that rule is that I didn’t want any­body say­ing, ‘You cer­tain­ly have an evil imag­i­na­tion, you made up all these bad things.’” And yet, she says, “I didn’t make them up.” In a Swift­ian way, she implies, we did—“we” being human­i­ty writ large, or, per­haps more accu­rate­ly, the destruc­tive, greedy, pow­er-mad indi­vid­u­als who wreak hav­oc on the lives of those they deem infe­ri­ors or right­ful prop­er­ty.

“As a writer,” she says above, “your goal is to keep your read­er believ­ing, even though both of you know it’s fic­tion.” Atwood’s trick to achiev­ing this is a devi­ous one in what we might call sci-fi or dark fan­ta­sy (though she spurns these des­ig­na­tions): she writes not only what she knows to be true, in some sense, but also what we know to be true, though we would rather it not be, as in Vir­ginia Woolf’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of fic­tion as “as spider’s web, attached ever so light­ly per­haps, but still attached to life at all four cor­ners.”

Atwood says that writ­ers turn away from the blank page because they fear some­thing. She has made it her busi­ness, instead, to turn toward fear, to see dark visions like those of her Mad­dAd­dam Tril­o­gy, an extrap­o­la­tion of hor­rors already hap­pen­ing, in some form, some­where in the world (and soon to be a fun-filled TV series). What she feared in 1984, the year she began writ­ing The Handmaid’s Tale, seems just as chill­ing­ly pre­scient to many readers—and view­ers of the TV adaptation—thirty-four years lat­er, a tes­ta­ment to Atwood’s spec­u­la­tive real­ism, and to the awful, stub­born resis­tance real­i­ty puts up to improve­ment.

As she put it in an essay about the novel’s ori­gins, “Nations nev­er build appar­ent­ly rad­i­cal forms of gov­ern­ment on foun­da­tions that aren’t there already.” The same, per­haps, might be said of nov­el­ists. Do you have some truths to tell in fic­tion­al form? Maybe Atwood is the per­fect guide to help you write them.

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Mar­garet Atwood Explains How Sto­ries Change with Tech­nol­o­gy

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

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

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Eleven Rules for Writing from Eight Contemporary Playwrights 

in Creativity, Theatre, Writing | May 11th, 2018

Chances are most of us won’t be imme­di­ate­ly famil­iar with the eight most­ly British play­wrights reflect­ing on their process in the Nation­al The­atre’s video, above.

That’s a good thing.

It’s eas­i­er to choose which pieces of inspir­ing, occa­sion­al­ly con­flict­ing writ­ing advice to fol­low when the scale’s not weight­ed down by the thumb of celebri­ty.

(Though rest assured that there’s no short­age of peo­ple who do know their work, if the Nation­al The­ater is plac­ing them in the hot seat.)

It’s impos­si­ble to fol­low all of their sug­ges­tions on any giv­en project, so go with your gut.

Or try your hand at one that doesn’t come nat­u­ral­ly, espe­cial­ly if you’ve been feel­ing stuck.

These approach­es are equal­ly valid for those writ­ing fic­tion, and pos­si­bly even cer­tain types of poet­ry and song.

The Nation­al wins points for assem­bling a diverse group—there are four women and four men, three of whom are peo­ple of col­or.

With­in this crew, it’s the women who over­whelm­ing­ly bring up the notions of per­mis­sion and per­fec­tion, as in it’s okay to let your first draft be absolute­ly dread­ful.

Most of the males are prone to plot­ting things out in advance.

And no one seems entire­ly at home marooned against a seam­less white back­ground on a plain wood­en stool.

Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, school shoot­ings, immi­gra­tion, race, cli­mate change, and homo­pho­bia are just some of the top­ics they have con­sid­ered in their plays.

Some have worked in film and TV, adapt­ed the clas­sics, or writ­ten for young audi­ences.

They have won pres­ti­gious awards, seen their plays staged ‘round the globe, and had suc­cess with oth­er artis­tic pur­suits, includ­ing poet­ry, per­for­mance, and dance.

Clear­ly, you’ll find some great advice below, though it’s not a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion. Let us know in the com­ments which rules you per­son­al­ly con­sid­er worth fol­low­ing.

Eleven Rules for Writ­ing from Eight Con­tem­po­rary Play­wrights

1. Start

or

2. Don’t start. Let your idea mar­i­nate for a min­i­mum of six months, then start.

3.. Have some sort of out­line or plan before you start

4. Do some research

5. Don’t be judg­men­tal of your writ­ing while you’re writ­ing

6. Embrace the ter­ri­ble first draft 

7. Don’t show any­one your first draft, unless you want to.

8. Know how it’s going to end

or

9. Don’t know how it’s going end

10. Work with oth­ers

11. Print it, and read it like some­one expe­ri­enc­ing it for the first time. No edit­ing aloud. Get that pen out of your hand.

And now, it’s time to dis­cov­er the work of the par­tic­i­pat­ing play­wrights. Go see a show, or at least read about one in the links:

In-Sook Chap­pell

Ryan Craig

Suhay­la El-Bushra

Inua Ellams

Lucy Kirk­wood

Evan Placey

Tanya Ron­der

Simon Stephens

The Nation­al The­atre has sev­er­al fas­ci­nat­ing playlists devot­ed to play­writ­ing. Find them here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Samuel Beck­ett, Absur­dist Play­wright, Nov­el­ist & Poet

How the Russ­ian The­atre Direc­tor Con­stan­tin Stanislavs­ki Rev­o­lu­tion­ized the Craft of Act­ing: A New Video Essay

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Wednes­day, May 16 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A New Scientific Study Supports Putting Two Spaces After a Period … and a Punctuation War Ensues

in Writing | May 9th, 2018

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In for­mer ages, wars erupt­ed over the fin­er points of reli­gious doc­trine, a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non that can seem per­plex­ing to mod­ern sec­u­lar­ists. We’re past such things, we think. But then let some­one bring up the Oxford com­ma or the num­ber of spaces one should put after a peri­od, and you may see writ­ers, edi­tors, and teach­ers pick sides and maybe come to blows in their defense of seem­ing­ly triv­ial gram­mat­i­cal and typo­graph­i­cal stan­dards. These debates approach the vehe­mence of Medieval argu­ments over tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion.

I exag­ger­ate, but maybe only slight­ly. There have been times, I con­fess, when I’ve felt I would fight for the ser­i­al com­ma. I grind my teeth and feel a rush of rage when I see two spaces instead of one after the end of sen­tences. Irra­tional, per­haps, but such is the human devo­tion to ortho­doxy in the details. And so, when Skid­more Col­lege researchers Rebec­ca John­son, Becky Bui, and Lind­say Schmitt pub­lished a paper last month in Atten­tion, Per­cep­tion, & Psy­chophysics claim­ing sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for a two-space peri­od, they vir­tu­al­ly lobbed a bomb into offices every­where.

Angela Chen at The Verge par­ried with an arti­cle call­ing two spaces a “hor­ri­ble habit.” The prac­tice “remains bad,” she writes, “it’s ugly, it doesn’t help when it comes to what mat­ters most (read­ing com­pre­hen­sion), and the exper­i­ment that sup­ports its ben­e­fits uses an out­dat­ed font style.” (Don’t get me start­ed on the font wars.) What was the exper­i­ment? The paper itself hides behind a redoubtable pay­wall, but Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Sean Gal­lagher gets to the gist of the study on a cohort of 60 Skid­more stu­dents.

Hav­ing iden­ti­fied sub­jects’ pro­cliv­i­ties, the researchers then gave them 21 para­graphs to read (includ­ing one prac­tice para­graph) on a com­put­er screen and tracked their eye move­ment as they read using an Eye­link 1000 video-based eye track­ing sys­tem. “Chin and fore­head rests were used to min­i­mize the read­er’s head move­ments,” the Skid­more researchers wrote in their paper.

After the track­ing, the researchers “eval­u­at­ed the read­ing speed for each of the para­graph types pre­sent­ed in words per minute.… [they] found that two spaces at the end of a peri­od slight­ly improved the pro­cess­ing of text dur­ing read­ing.” The study’s attempt to quan­ti­fy the ben­e­fits of two spaces came after the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Man­u­al’s most recent edi­tion, which, for some rea­son, has changed camps to two spaces.

Gal­lagher explains the space debate as stem­ming from the major tech­no­log­i­cal shift in word pro­cess­ing: “For any­one who learned their key­board­ing skills on a type­writer rather than a com­put­er… the dou­ble-space after the peri­od is a deeply ingrained truth.” Speak­ing as such a per­son, it isn’t, but he’s right to note that typ­ing teach­ers insist­ed on two spaces. Such was the stan­dard until com­put­ers with vari­able-width fonts ful­ly phased out type­writ­ers.

So the Skid­more researchers raised the ire of Chen and oth­ers with their use of Couri­er New, a “fixed-width font that resem­bles type­writ­ten text—used by hard­ly any­one for doc­u­ments.” The blog Prac­ti­cal Typog­ra­phy ana­lyzed the two space paper and remains unim­pressed: “In sum—a small dif­fer­ence, lim­it­ed to a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry of test sub­jects, with numer­ous caveats attached. Not much to see here, I’m afraid.” (This descrip­tion might accu­rate­ly describe thou­sands of pub­lished stud­ies.)

This war will rage on—the study fuel­ing these recent skir­mish­es does not seem to jus­ti­fy two-spac­ers claim­ing vic­to­ry. And any­way, good luck get­ting the rest of us to aban­don faith in the one true space.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­tor­i­cal Plaque Memo­ri­al­izes the Time Jack Ker­ouac & William S. Bur­roughs Came to Blows Over the Oxford Com­ma (Or Not)

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

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

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

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Malcolm Gladwell Explains Where His Ideas Come From

in Creativity, Writing | April 16th, 2018

For many read­ers out there, the pub­li­ca­tion of a new Mal­colm Glad­well arti­cle ranks as an event demand­ing imme­di­ate atten­tion. They’ll read what­ev­er he writes, not just because they enjoy his style but because they trust his instinct for find­ing fas­ci­nat­ing sub­jects, from cof­fee to health care, col­lege rank­ings to dog train­ing, shop­ping malls to school shoot­ings. How did he devel­op that instinct? He reveals aspects of his idea-gen­er­at­ing process in the sev­en­teen-minute inter­view with New York­er edi­tor David Rem­nick just above. It turns out that, just as with most of us — or as it would ide­al­ly go with most of us — Glad­well’s ideas sprout organ­i­cal­ly from his strengths.

But those strengths, in turn, sprout organ­i­cal­ly from his weak­ness­es. An ear­ly New York­er assign­ment, hand­ed down by then-edi­tor Tina Brown, had Glad­well cov­er­ing the 1989 attack on the woman referred to, at the time, as the Cen­tral Park Jog­ger. Instead of doing the kind of pro­longed, emo­tion­al inter­views many reporters would have done with the vic­tim’s friends and fam­i­ly, he instead con­tact­ed the sur­geon who oper­at­ed on her, end­ing up with a piece on “prac­tice vari­a­tion in med­i­cine,” the phe­nom­e­non where­by dif­fer­ent med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers in dif­fer­ent regions of the coun­try end up going about their job in per­sis­tent­ly dif­fer­ent ways. “They can’t seem to get every­one on the same page,” as Glad­well frames the prob­lem.


The inter­sec­tion of the New York­er’s tra­di­tion of and expec­ta­tion for long-form pieces with his own inabil­i­ty to per­form tra­di­tion­al reportage gave Glad­well a sense of where he should look for promis­ing leads. Reject­ing char­ac­ter as a hook, he instead goes look­ing for intrigu­ing the­o­ries, oper­at­ing on the con­cep­tion of most writ­ers as “expe­ri­ence-rich and the­o­ry-poor.” Instead of sim­ply report­ing on the lat­est school shoot­ing, for instance, he wrote about a Stan­ford soci­ol­o­gist’s the­o­ry of riots that he could apply to the phe­nom­e­non of school shoot­ings them­selves. His next book, about which he reveals a thing or two in this inter­view, deals in part with a dif­fer­ent kind of shoot­ing: that com­mit­ted by police.

“I have the advan­tage of com­ing to it late,” Glad­well says to Rem­nick, explain­ing how his per­spec­tive and thus his writ­ing on the sub­ject might dif­fer from those of oth­ers. That sim­ple state­ment may hold the key to Glad­well’s vault of ideas: with no oblig­a­tion to give a run­down of the facts as they emerge, he can step back for a moment (be it a few months or a few decades) and get a sense of which sto­ries will ulti­mate­ly take the right shape to con­nect to the many broad, intrigu­ing ideas, in the form of aca­d­e­m­ic the­o­ry or oth­er­wise, with which he’s already famil­iar­ized him­self. As much as Glad­well seems like a writer of the moment (and here he describes his “ur-read­er” as a fortysome­thing Trad­er Joe’s exec­u­tive who only has time for three books a year, plus pod­casts), he gets a fair bit of mileage out of one of the most old-fash­ioned assets of them all: a well-stocked mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Writ­ing in Cof­fee Shops: Why Mal­colm Glad­well Does It, and You Should Too

Mal­colm Glad­well to Teach His First Online Course: A Mas­ter Class on How to Turn Big Ideas into Pow­er­ful Sto­ries

Where Do Ideas Come From? David Lynch, Robert Krul­wich, Susan Orlean, Chuck Close & Oth­ers Reveal Their Cre­ative Sources

John Cleese on the Ori­gin of Cre­ativ­i­ty

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Gustave Flaubert Tells His Mother Why Serious Writers Shouldn’t Bother with Day Jobs (1850)

in Letters, Life, Writing | April 6th, 2018

We are what we do — or in oth­er words, we are what we choose to spend our time doing. By this log­ic, a “musi­cian” who spends one quar­ter of his time with his instru­ments and three quar­ters with Excel, though he counts as no less a human being for it, should by rights call him­self a mak­er of spread­sheets rather than a mak­er of music. This view may sound stark, but it has its adher­ents, some of them suc­cess­ful and respect­ed artists. We can rest assured that no less a cre­ator than Gus­tave Flaubert, for instance, would sure­ly have accept­ed it, if we take seri­ous­ly the words of a let­ter he wrote to his moth­er in Feb­ru­ary of 1850.

Though he’d com­plet­ed sev­er­al books at the time, the then 28-year-old Flaubert had yet to make it as a man of let­ters. He did, how­ev­er, do a fair bit of trav­el­ing at that time in his life, com­pos­ing this par­tic­u­lar piece of cor­re­spon­dence dur­ing a sojourn in the Mid­dle East. It seems that even halfway across the world, he could­n’t escape his moth­er’s entreaties to find prop­er employ­ment, if only “un petite place” that would grant him slight­ly more social respectabil­i­ty and finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. Final­ly fed up, he clar­i­fied his posi­tion on the mat­ter of day jobs once and for all:

Now I come to some­thing that you seem to enjoy revert­ing to and that I utter­ly fail to under­stand. You are nev­er at a loss of things to tor­ment your­self about. What is the sense of this: that I must have a job — “a small job,” you say. First of all, what job? I defy you to find me one, to spec­i­fy in what field, or what it would be like. Frankly, and with­out delud­ing your­self, is there a sin­gle one that I am capa­ble of fill­ing? You add: “One that would­n’t take up much of your time and would­n’t pre­vent you from doing oth­er things.” There’s the delu­sion! That’s what Bouil­het told him­self when he took up med­i­cine, what I told myself when I began law, which near­ly brought about my death from sup­pressed rage. When one does some­thing, one must do it whol­ly and well. Those bas­tard exis­tences where you sell suet all day and write poet­ry at night are made for mediocre minds — like those hors­es equal­ly good for sad­dle and car­riage — the worst kind, that can nei­ther jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

In short, it seems to me that one takes a job for mon­ey, for hon­ors, or as an escape from idle­ness. Now you’ll grant me, dar­ling, (1) that I keep busy enough not to have to go out look­ing for some­thing to do; and (2) if it’s a ques­tion of hon­ors, my van­i­ty is such that I’m inca­pable of feel­ing myself hon­ored by any­thing: a posi­tion, how­ev­er high it might be (and that isn’t the kind you speak of) will nev­er give me the sat­is­fac­tion that I derive from my self-respect when I have accom­plished some­thing well in my own way; and final­ly, if it’s for mon­ey, any jobs or job that I could have would bring in too lit­tle to make much dif­fer­ence to my income. Weigh all these con­sid­er­a­tions: don’t knock your head against a hol­low idea. Is there any posi­tion in which I’d be clos­er to you, more yours? And isn’t not to be bored one of the prin­ci­pal goals of life?

The let­ter may well have con­vinced her: accord­ing to a foot­note includ­ed in The Let­ters of Gus­tave Flaubert: 1830–1857, “there seem to have been no fur­ther sug­ges­tions” that he secure a steady pay­check. Could Flaubert’s moth­er have had an inkling that her son would become, well, Flaubert? At that point he had­n’t even begun writ­ing Madame Bovary, a project that would begin upon his return to France. Its inspi­ra­tion came in part from the ear­ly ver­sion of The Temp­ta­tion of Saint Antho­ny he’d com­plet­ed before embark­ing on his trav­els, which his friends Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouil­het (the reluc­tant med­ical stu­dent men­tioned in the let­ter) sug­gest­ed he toss in the fire, telling him to write about the stuff of every­day life instead.

Not all of us, of course, can work the same way Flaubert did, with his days spent in revi­sion of each page and his obses­sive life­long hunt for le mot juste: not for noth­ing do we call him “the mar­tyr of style.” But what­ev­er we cre­ate and how­ev­er we cre­ate it, we ignore the words Flaubert wrote to his moth­er at our per­il. The earn­ing of mon­ey has its place, but the idea that any old day job can be eas­i­ly held down with­out dam­age to our real life’s work shades all too eas­i­ly into self-delu­sion. We must remem­ber that “when one does some­thing, one must do it whol­ly and well,” a sen­ti­ment made infi­nite­ly more pow­er­ful by the fact that Flaubert did­n’t just artic­u­late it, he lived it — and now occu­pies one of the high­est places in the pan­theon of the nov­el as a result.

h/t Tom H.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 4,500 Unpub­lished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

How Sein­feld, the Sit­com Famous­ly “About Noth­ing,” Is Like Gus­tave Flaubert’s Nov­els About Noth­ing

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

William Faulkn­er Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spec­tac­u­lar Let­ter (1924)

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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The Case for Writing in Coffee Shops: Why Malcolm Gladwell Does It, and You Should Too

in Food & Drink, Writing | March 6th, 2018

Pho­to by Kris Krüg via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I passed Mal­colm Glad­well on the street a few years ago, on the final stop of a road trip I took from Los Ange­les to Raleigh, North Car­oli­na. At the time I won­dered why the unmis­tak­able New York-based writer, speak­er, and inter­preter of big ideas had come to town. But now that I know a lit­tle bit about his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al habits, I can at least say with some con­fi­dence where he was going: a cof­fee shop. That Glad­well’s work has, over the years, occa­sion­al­ly touched on the sub­ject of cof­fee sug­gests he may well enjoy a good brew, but in that same time he’s also stat­ed, explic­it­ly and repeat­ed­ly, that cafés are where he does the work itself.

“I loved the news­room,” Glad­well, who got his start in one, once told The Guardian. “When I left it I want­ed to recre­ate the news­room and the clos­est thing to a news­room is any kind of ran­dom active social space.” The best cof­fee shop offers what he calls “the right kind of dis­trac­tion. There has to be some sort of osmot­ic process,” just as hap­pens with jour­nal­ists togeth­er in the office. “I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly think cof­fee shops are amaz­ing places to write,” he more recent­ly said in a pod­cast inter­view with econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen (embed­ded below). “But I do think that sim­ply being around peo­ple who are not my age is real­ly use­ful.”

“The cof­fee-shop writer needs to be, as the soci­ol­o­gists would say, an out­lier and not a pio­neer,” Glad­well writes in the Wall Street Jour­nal. (Even in a per­son­al essay, it seems, he can’t resist apply­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic con­cept to every­day life.) “You don’t want to be the lap­top cow­boy who sig­nals to oth­er lap­top cow­boys that this is the place to be. You want the club that won’t have you as a mem­ber.” He goes on to rec­om­mend the rig­or­ous likes of Man­hat­tan’s lap­top-ban­ning Café Grumpy and Zurich’s La Stan­za: “no com­fy chairs, no Wi-Fi, no out­lets, and cof­fee so ridicu­lous­ly expen­sive that it func­tions as a tax on lin­ger­ing.”

Oth­er Glad­well-approved writ­ing cafés include Fer­nan­dez and Wells in Lon­don, Chez Prune in Paris (until, that is, it flood­ed with “Vas­sar girls with their Gitanes cig­a­rettes and their Thomas Mann”), and “the back booths in the Swan Restau­rant on Queen Street West” in Toron­to. These far-flung spots align well with the oth­er per­son­al writ­ing strat­e­gy Glad­well explained to Cowen: “I trav­el a lot. And that’s a real­ly, real­ly use­ful way of break­ing out of bad intel­lec­tu­al habits, and to remind your­self about what the rest of the world is like.” As a hard-writ­ing habitué of the cof­fee shops of Seoul, I sec­ond Glad­well’s advice, but I should note that fol­low­ing it won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly get you to his lev­el of pop­u­lar­i­ty and acclaim; com­bine it with his new Mas­ter­class on writ­ing, though, and hey, who knows.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm Glad­well to Teach His First Online Course: A Mas­ter Class on How to Turn Big Ideas into Pow­er­ful Sto­ries

Mal­colm Glad­well on Why Genius Takes Time: A Look at the Mak­ing of Elvis Costello’s “Depor­tee” & Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah”

Mal­colm Glad­well: What We Can Learn from Spaghet­ti Sauce

The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemi­an Cof­fee Bars Doc­u­ment­ed in a Vin­tage 1959 News­reel

Do You Speak Java Jive?: The Lan­guage of the Indie Cafes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Malcolm Gladwell Teaching His First Online Course: A Master Class on How to Turn Big Ideas into Powerful Stories

in Online Courses, Writing | February 28th, 2018

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.

The one about the dog whis­per­er, the one about how job inter­views and sports drafts work (or don’t), the one about the ideas Apple took from Xerox PARC to cre­ate the per­son­al com­put­er as we know it: most of us have a favorite Mal­colm Glad­well arti­cle. (I hap­pen to like the one on how an Aus­tri­an archi­tect invent­ed the Amer­i­can shop­ping mall, so much that I’ve pre­vi­ous­ly cit­ed it here on Open Cul­ture.) Those all ran in the New York­er, where Glad­well has con­tributed since 1996. Since then, his enter­pris­es have expand­ed to include best­selling books, much-cir­cu­lat­ed TED Talks, and even a hit pod­cast. How does he do it?

We now have the chance to learn just that in a new online course taught by Glad­well him­self, going live this spring on Mas­ter­class. Though many know him only from his speak­ing or audio­vi­su­al media, the core of his work still gets done when he puts words on a page. Hence the title and sub­ject mat­ter of his Mas­ter­class: “Mal­colm Glad­well Teach­es Writ­ing.”

If you sign up for Mas­ter­Class through an All-Access Pass, we’re promised insight into how Glad­well uses ordi­nary sub­jects to help “mil­lions of read­ers devour com­plex ideas like behav­ioral eco­nom­ics and per­for­mance pre­dic­tion” and an under­stand­ing of how he “research­es top­ics, crafts char­ac­ters, and dis­tills big ideas into sim­ple, pow­er­ful nar­ra­tives.”

“We’re going to talk about sus­pense, struc­ture, research, humil­i­ty, char­ac­ters, puz­zles, and semi­colons,” says Glad­well in the course’s trail­er above. He also men­tions one of the com­mon mis­takes he’ll cor­rect: that “writ­ers spend a lot of time think­ing about how to start their sto­ries and not a lot of time think­ing about how to end them.” If you’ve always want­ed to write Glad­wellian prose — “at an eighth grade lev­el,” as he him­self describes it, “but with ideas that are super sophis­ti­cat­ed” — this Mas­ter­class’ twen­ty lessons will get you putting in a few of the ten thou­sand (or so) hours you need to attain mas­tery. That might sound like a lot of time, but keep Glad­well’s words of guid­ance in mind: “The job of the writer is not to sup­ply the ideas; it is to be patient enough to find the ideas.”

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm Glad­well on Why Genius Takes Time: A Look at the Mak­ing of Elvis Costello’s “Depor­tee” & Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah”

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

Mal­colm Glad­well: Tax­es Were High and Life Was Just Fine

Mal­colm Glad­well: What We Can Learn from Spaghet­ti Sauce

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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