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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Hear John Malkovich Read From Breakfast of Champions, Then Hear Kurt Vonnegut Do the Same

in Audio Books, Writing | June 25th, 2015

In high school when I was trying to write surrealistic short stories in the vein of Richard Brautigan, despite not really understanding 90 percent of Richard Brautigan, my English teacher recommended I start reading Kurt Vonnegut, so later that day I went down to our city’s sci-fi book/comic book store and bought on her recommendation Breakfast of Champions. A comic novel, it was breezy and fun, and by gum, had cartoons in it! (One was of a cat’s butthole, the effect of which on a high schooler’s mind cannot be overstated.)

But, I admit, I haven’t read it since–the world and my tsundoku is too big for rereadings–and maybe you haven’t read it at all, or perhaps it’s your favorite book. It was the novel Vonnegut published four years after his best known work Slaughterhouse Five. When he graded his novels in his 1981 “Autobiographical Collage” Palm Sunday he gave Breakfast a C. It’s certainly one of his most rambling novels, where he brings back Slaughterhouse Five’s sci-fi author Kilgore Trout and pairs him with the delusional Dwayne Hoover, and unpacks all the dark parts of American history, from racism to capitalism to environmental degradation in passages both sober and bleakly comic.

John Malkovich doesn’t seem like the obvious choice to read Vonnegut for this audiobook, a short excerpt of which can be heard above. (Note: you can download the complete Malkovich reading for free via Audible’s Free Trial program.) But the passage is key in that it introduces the martini cocktail lounge origins of the book’s title, and Malkovich brings out the droll irony of Vonnegut’s writing, especially the way he rolls the word “schizophrenia” off his tongue. There’s a bit of the schizoid in every author, letting a world of characters speak through them like a medium.

For comparison, check out this earlier Open Culture post about Vonnegut reading a long section from Breakfast of Champions in 1970. The author chuckles at some of his more comic passages, and the audience roars along. The timing is that of a standup routine, but this opening—one assumes its the opening—would go on to be furiously rewritten, dropping the first person style. It’s an alternative universe Breakfast that can only leave one to wonder how the rest of the novel might have been handled.

h/t Ayun

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Umberto Eco’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

in Life, Writing | June 18th, 2015

Umberto Eco, now 83 years old, has some advice to pass along to the young.

In March, the Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist — and, of course, author of Foucault’s Pendulum — published How to Write a Thesis. It’s a witty, irreverent and practical guide for the student laboring over a thesis or dissertation. Josh Jones has more on that here.

Now, in a newly-released video from The Louisiana Channel (a media outlet based in Denmark), Eco turns his attention toward aspiring writers. And his wise counsel comes down to this: Keep your ego in check, make sure your ambitions are realistic, put in the time and the hard work, and don’t shoot for the Nobel Prize in Literature straight out of the gate. That, Eco says, kills every literary career. He’ll also tell you that writing is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” They’re truisms — you discover when you’re an octogenarian — that turn out to be true.

Find more tips for aspiring writers below.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser

in Writing | May 13th, 2015

Image used with permission by Mark Ostow/Yale Alumni Magazine

Author William Zinsser died at his Manhattan home on Tuesday, May 12, 2015. The 92-year-old left behind one of the classics of writing instruction manuals as his legacy, On Writing Well. Since its first printing in 1976, the book has sold 1.5 million copies, and Zinsser made sure to update the book often. He loved the revolution in writing that computers brought, calling it a miracle.

Never have so many Americans written so profusely and with so few inhibitions. Which means that it wasn’t a cognitive problem after all. It was a cultural problem, rooted in that old bugaboo of American education: fear.

Zinsser stressed simplicity and efficiency, but also style and enthusiasm. Here are 10 of his many tips for improving your writing.

1. Don’t make lazy word choices: “You’ll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words. Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.”

2. On the other hand, avoid jargon and big words: “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.”

3. Writing is hard work: “A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”

4. Write in the first person: “Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.”

5. And the more you keep in first person and true to yourself, the sooner you will find your style: “Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.

6. Don’t ask who your audience is…you are the audience: “You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”

7. Study the masters but also your contemporaries: “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”

8. Yes, the thesaurus is your friend: “The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the songwriter–a reminder of all the choices–and you should use it with gratitude. If, having found the scalawag and the scapegrace, you want to know how they differ, then go to the dictionary.”

9. Read everything you write out loud for rhythm and sound: “Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write.”

10. And don’t ever believe you are going to write anything definitive: “Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.”

Zinsser follows his own advice, in that this book (pick up a copy here) is a joy to read, with a rollicking humor and an infectious enthusiasm. May he rest in peace!

Finally, as someone who can’t stand to hear the word ‘unique’ modified, Zinsser has this to say: “…being ‘rather unique’ is no more possible than being rather pregnant.’”

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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David Ogilvy’s 1982 Memo “How to Write” Offers 10 Pieces of Timeless Advice

in Writing | April 23rd, 2015

Nobody ever went broke writing a readable guide to writing in English, especially those that rise to the ranks of standard recommendations alongside Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Both of those books endorse and exemplify the virtue of brevity, but even such short volumes take a great deal longer to read and internalize than this eminently to-the-point English style guide by the “Pope of Modern Advertising,” (and, for his part, a fan of Roman and Raphaelson’s Writing That Works) David Ogilvy, originally composed in the form of an internal memo.

Ogilvy sent it out on September 7th, 1982, directing it to everyone employed at Ogilvy & Mather, the respected ad agency he’d founded more than thirty years before. “The memo was entitled ‘How to Write,’ ” says Lists of Note, “and consisted of the following list of advice:”

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

And since we all send out more written communication today than we would have in 1982, the points on this list have only grown more advisable with time. “The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather,” Ogilvy adds. “People who think well, write well.” Amid all this practical advice, we’d do well not to forget that essential connection between word and thought. I like to quote a favorite Twitter aphorist of mine — and, per Ogilvy’s warning, I’ve checked my quotation first — on the subject: “People say they can’t draw when they mean they can’t see, and that they can’t write when they mean they can’t think.”

For more on the methods of Ogilvy the self-described “lousy copywriter” (but “good editor”), see also Lists of Note’s sister site Letters of Note, which has a 1955 letter wherein he lays out his work habits. A seemingly effective one involves “half a bottle of rum and a Handel oratorio on the gramophone.” Your mileage may vary.

via Lists of Note

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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.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

in Literature, Writing | April 10th, 2015

When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” And, in a master’s thesis rejected by The University of Chicago, he made the tantalizing argument that “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight essential tips on how to write a short story:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
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.
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.
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.

Vonnegut put down his advice in the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor,” writes Vonnegut. “She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

Now if you want to learn to write with style, that’s another story. And Vonnegut has advice on that too here.

via BrainPickings

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Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Brothel Visits Per Month

in Life, Literature, Writing | March 30th, 2015

Many aspiring epic novelists surely wouldn’t mind writing like Leo Tolstoy. But can you write like the writer you admire without living like the writer you admire? Biographies reveal plenty of facts about how the author of such immortal volumes as War and Peace and Anna Karenina passed his 82 years, none more telling than that even Leo Tolstoy struggled to live like Leo Tolstoy. “I must get used to the idea, once and for all, that I am an exceptional human being,” he wrote in 1853, at age 25, underscoring that “I have not met one man who is morally as good as I am, or ready to sacrifice everything for his ideal, as I am.”

Clearly, excessive modesty didn’t count among Tolstoy’s faults. Seven years before making that declaration, he had already envisioned for himself a life of virtue and industry, laying out what he called his “rules of life,” perhaps a foreshadowing of his search for a rigorously religious life without belief in a higher being. The website Tolstoy Therapy has posted a selection of these rules, which commanded him as follows:

Wake at five o’clock
Go to bed no later than ten o’clock
Two hours permissible for sleeping during the day
Eat moderately
Avoid sweet foods
Walk for an hour every day
Visit a brothel only twice a month
Love those to whom I could be of service
Disregard all public opinion not based on reason
Only do one thing at a time
Disallow flights of imagination unless necessary

To this list of precepts drawn up at the dawn of his adult life, most of which wouldn’t seem out of place as any of our 21st-century new year’s resolutions, Tolstoy later added these:

Never to show emotion
Stop caring about other people’s opinion of myself
Do good things inconspicuously
Keep away from women
Suppress lust by working hard
Help those less fortunate

Even if you haven’t read much about Tolstoy’s life, you may sense in some of these general principles evidence of battles with particular impulses: observe, for instance, how his twice-monthly limit on brothel visits becomes the much more stringent and much less realistic forbiddance of women entirely. But perhaps his technique of working hard, however well or poorly it suppressed his lust (the man did father fourteen children, after all), benefited him in the end, given the vast and (often literally) weighty body of work he left behind.

“Between ‘rules of life’ and life itself, what a chasm!” exclaims biographer Henri Troyat in Tolstoy. But as rich with interest as we find books like that, we ultimately care about writers not because of how they live, but because of how they write. The young Tolstoy knew that, too; “the publication of Childhood and ‘The Raid’ having made him, in his own eyes, a genuine man of letters,” writes Troyat, “he soon added no less peremptory ‘Rules of Writing’ to his ‘Rules of Life’:”

When you criticize your work, always put yourself in the position of the most limited reader, who is looking only for entertainment in a book.
The most interesting books are those in which the author pretends to hide his own opinion and yet remains faithful to it.
When rereading and revising, do not think about what should be added (no matter how admirable the thoughts that come to mind) … but about how much can be taken away without distorting the overall meaning.

Then again, War and Peace has in the modern day become a byword for sheer length, and few readers not already steeped in 19th-century Russian literature would turn to Tolstoy for pure entertainment. Perhaps the writer’s life implicitly adds one caveat atop all the ever-stricter rules he made for himself while living it: nobody’s perfect.

via Tolstoy Therapy

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

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Umberto Eco’s How To Write a Thesis: A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English

in Books, Education, Writing | March 23rd, 2015

Image by Università Reggio Calabria, released under a C BY-SA 3.0 license.

In general, the how-to book—whether on beekeeping, piano-playing, or wilderness survival—is a dubious object, always running the risk of boring readers into despairing apathy or hopelessly perplexing them with complexity. Instructional books abound, but few succeed in their mission of imparting theoretical wisdom or keen, practical skill. The best few I’ve encountered in my various roles have mostly done the former. In my days as an educator, I found abstract, discursive books like Robert Scholes’ Textual Power or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyrical Beat Not the Poor Desk infinitely more salutary than more down-to-earth books on the art of teaching. As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s idiosyncratic The Art of the Novel—a book that might have been titled The Art of Kundera—a great deal more inspiring than any number of other well-meaning MFA-lite publications. And as a self-taught audio engineer, I’ve found a book called Zen and the Art of Mixing—a classic of the genre, even shorter on technical specifications than its namesake is on motorcycle maintenance—better than any other dense, diagram-filled manual.

How I wish, then, that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had had access to the English translation, just published this month, of Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.”

For example, in the second part of his introduction, after a rather dry definition of the academic “thesis,” Eco dissuades a certain type of possible reader from his book, those students “who are forced to write a thesis so that they may graduate quickly and obtain the career advancement that originally motivated their university enrollment.” These students, he writes, some of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instructions on how to write a thesis in a month.” To them, he recommends two pieces of advice, in full knowledge that both are clearly “illegal”:

(a) Invest a reasonable amount of money in having a thesis written by a second party. (b) Copy a thesis that was written a few years prior for another institution. (It is better not to copy a book currently in print, even if it was written in a foreign language. If the professor is even minimally informed on the topic, he will be aware of the book’s existence.

Eco goes on to say that “even plagiarizing a thesis requires an intelligent research effort,” a caveat, I suppose, for those too thoughtless or lazy even to put the required effort into academic dishonesty.

Instead, he writes for “students who want to do rigorous work” and “want to write a thesis that will provide a certain intellectual satisfaction.” Eco doesn’t allow for the fact that these groups may not be mutually exclusive, but no matter. His style is loose and conversational, and the unseriousness of his dogmatic assertions belies the liberating tenor of his advice. For all of the fun Eco has discussing the whys and wherefores of academic writing, he also dispenses a wealth of practical hows, making his book a rarity among the small pool of readable How-tos. For example, Eco offers us “Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic,” the very bedrock of a doctoral (or masters) project, on which said project truly stands or falls:

1. The topic should reflect your previous studies and experience. It should be related to your completed courses; your other research; and your political, cultural, or religious experience.

2. The necessary sources should be materially accessible. You should be near enough to the sources for convenient access, and you should have the permission you need to access them.

3. The necessary sources should be manageable. In other words, you should have the ability, experience, and background knowledge needed to understand the sources.

4. You should have some experience with the methodological framework that you will use in the thesis. For example, if your thesis topic requires you to analyze a Bach violin sonata, you should be versed in music theory and analysis.

Having suffered the throes of proposing, then actually writing, an academic thesis, I can say without reservation that, unlike Eco’s encouragement to plagiarism, these four rules are not only helpful, but necessary, and not nearly as obvious as they appear. Eco goes on in the following chapter, “Choosing the Topic,” to present many examples, general and specific, of how this is so.

Much of the remainder of Eco’s book—though written in as lively a style and shot through with witticisms and profundity—is gravely outdated in its minute descriptions of research methods and formatting and style guides. This is pre-internet, and technology has—sadly in many cases—made redundant much of the footwork he discusses. That said, his startling takes on such topics as “Must You Read Books?,” “Academic Humility,” “The Audience,” and “How to Write” again offer indispensable ways of thinking about scholarly work that one generally arrives at only, if at all, at the completion of a long, painful, and mostly bewildering course of writing and research.

FYI: You can download Eco’s book, How to Write a Thesis, as a free audiobook if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free trial program. Find details here.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

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

Hear John Malkovich Read From Breakfast of Champions, Then Hear Kurt Vonnegut Do the Same

Umberto Eco’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser

David Ogilvy’s 1982 Memo “How to Write” Offers 10 Pieces of Timeless Advice

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Brothel Visits Per Month

Umberto Eco’s How To Write a Thesis: A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English

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