Woody Allen’s Typewriter, Scissors and Stapler: The Great Filmmaker Shows Us How He Writes

in Film, Writing | January 12th, 2013

Here’s a fascinating little window into the working habits of one our most brilliant and prolific artists. It’s from Robert B. Weide’s 2011 PBS film Woody Allen: A Documentary. In the scene above, Allen shows us the machine he has used for sixty years, the only typewriter he has ever owned: an early fifties manual Olympia SM‑3. “I bought this when I was sixteen,” Allen says. “It still works like a tank.”

Every comedy sketch, every screenplay, every essay ever written by Allen was composed on the one typewriter. When Weide asks Allen how he manages without the “cut-and-paste” functions of a word processor, he pulls out a pair of scissors and an old Swingline stapler. “It’s very primitive, I know,” says Allen, “but it works very well for me.”

“Allen’s persistence in using the one and only typewriter of his life, and in practicing cut-and-staple editing are certainly curious, quaint, idiosyncratic, even endearing,” writes Richard Brody in the Front Row blog at The New Yorker; “but they’re also proof on the wing of two of Allen’s lifelong qualities–untimeliness and hermeticism–as well as of the enduring struggle in his films between writing and experience.”

Woody Allen Boxes a Kangaroo, 1967

Woody Allen Talks With the Reverand Billy Graham

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Author Gary Shteyngart Reveals Why He Willingly Blurbs His Brains Out

in Books, Comedy, Writing | January 11th, 2013

If you’re an author of literary fiction, you’d do well to shoot fellow author Gary Shteyngart an advance copy of that soon-to-be-published masterpiece you’ve got in the pipeline. He won’t just love the book, he’ll blurb it, thus telegraphing your insider status to the establishment and readers in the know. It’s a far from an exclusive club. As author Levi Asher notes in the video above, Shteyngart’s the sort of mensch who willingly blurbs his friends. Also friends of friends. Ditto strangers. (Former stranger Karen Russell wonders if perhaps some agent-deployed fruit basket was responsible for garnering her some of Shteyngart’s “swami magic”.)

The insouciant quality of the typical Shteyngart endorsement is not intended to telegraph any insincerity on his part. His mission is securing readers for the sort of titles indie bookstores hold dear, and in order for that mission to succeed, he has to generate blurbs by the bushel. He may not get to the end of every volume he champions, but he makes it deep enough to get a general sense that such a thing might be pleasurable.

His highly public willingness to clamor aboard other authors’ bandwagons has been described as both promiscuity and performance art. It has inspired a tumblr, and now the tongue-in-cheek mini-documentary above. Narrated by Jonathan Ames, it features a cavalcade of grateful New York City-based lit stars, gamely striving to exude the sort of devil-may-care buoyancy at which their hero excels.

Thanks to Edward C. for sending this along.

- Ayun Halliday’s best known book was blurbed by Stephen Colbert.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

in Literature, Writing | January 10th, 2013

Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons

Jack Kerouac is the patron saint of every starry-eyed, born-too-late, wanderlusty hipster scribe who falls in love with the poetry and visionary power of their own inner voice. I may be old and crusty now, but I once fell under Kerouac’s spell and spilled my guts unedited into long rambling prose-poems on existential bliss and tantric Buddhist bebop. Then later I realized something: Kerouac’s Kerouac was very good. My Kerouac? Not so much. You gotta do your own thing. I grew out of Kerouac’s influence and didn’t take much of him with me. Then I realized that he wasn’t always good. That he’d made the mistake of every self-proclaimed genius and stopped letting people tell him “no.” He said so himself, in a 1968 Paris Review interview with Ted Berrigan in which he admitted that all his editors since the great Malcolm Cowley, “had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it.” Now I know this was part of his method, but sometimes the later Kerouac needed a good editor.

It is a delicate dance, between the inner voice and outer editor—whether that taskmaster is oneself or someone else—and the great attraction to Kerouac is his damn-it-all attitude toward tasks and masters. His improvisational prose is the point (I’m sure someone will tell me I missed it).

Kerouac doesn’t just write about freedom, he writes freedom, and for most of us tight-assed worrywarts, his voice is healing balm for our writer’s inner excoriations. 1957’s On the Road is an incredible experiment in process as product (it’s not only a novel, it’s an art object)–a three-week burst of non-stop, uninhibited creativity, so legend has it, and unequaled in his lifetime. And yet despite his aversion to tidiness, Kerouac, like almost every writer, made lists; one in particular is thirty guidelines he called “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” I’ve excerpted what I think are ten highlights below, either because they seem profoundly beautiful or profoundly silly, but in a way that only Kerouac the holy fool could get away with. This is not “advice for writers.” It’s a catalog of states of being.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.

Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose

Jack Kerouac’s Poetry & Prose Read/Performed by 20 Icons: Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Johnny Depp & More

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

What’s the Deal with Pop Tarts? Jerry Seinfeld Explains How to Write a Joke

in Comedy, Writing | December 21st, 2012

This week The New York Times Magazine published a story titled “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” filling us in on what the comedian has been up to in the 14 years since Seinfeld, the sitcom that seemed to define the ’90s, went off the air. As Jonah Weiner explains, Seinfeld has been “living the life of a road comic, albeit one who sells out 20,000-seat London arenas and schleps to gigs via chartered planes rather than rented subcompacts.”

Despite his great wealth, Seinfeld has chosen to devote part of almost every week since 2000 (two years after the end of the TV show) to doing stand-up comedy. At 58, Seinfeld remains fully committed to the craft of telling jokes to a roomful of strangers. As he tells Weiner, he sees himself more as an exacting athlete than a tortured artist. “I’m not filling a deep emotional hole here,” Seinfeld says. “I’m playing a very difficult game, and if you’d like to see someone who’s very good at a difficult game, that’s what I do.”

And if you’d like to learn a little about how the game of stand-up comedy is played, the Times has posted this interesting five-minute video in which Seinfeld explains the evolution of a joke, from simple childhood observation to carefully thought-out gag. “Whereas most comedians are lazy bastards,” Sarah Silverman says of Seinfeld, “he’s the ultimate craftsman.”

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Writers’ Houses Gives You a Virtual Tour of Famous Authors’ Homes

in Life, Literature, Writing | December 14th, 2012

I’ve always been somewhat amused by the accounts of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s brief bohemian affair. The older, married, and internally tortured Catholic Verlaine’s pining for the self-destructive and precocious young Rimbaud always presents a ridiculous picture in prose. But it’s a picture that takes on much clearer contours when, for the first time, I get to see the house they occupied on 8 Royal College Street (above). The image of the house, with its forbidding brick façade, gives their really pretty unpleasant story a gravitas that literary history can’t approach. Whether seen in person or in a photograph, the effect of viewing any revered author’s home is similar: histories once subject to biographers’ caprice take on the irrefutable weight of physical reality. And while I’d love to have the luxury of a pilgrimage to all my literary heroes’ homes, I’m content with the next best thing: an internet tour in pictures. That’s exactly what one gets at the Writers’ Houses site, which has collected dozens of images of famous writers’ homes, sourced mainly from user photos.

And so homebodies like myself can read their favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets while gazing at her Austerlitz, NY home “Steepletop” (below, a bit more modest than I’d imagined):

Likewise, I can read Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque little stories and be continually amazed that she did not emerge from some Medieval cloister in a fiery Southern wild but from the bright, rambling farmhouse called “Andalusia” (below).

And while I can only connect Thomas Hardy’s country gothic novels and bleak poetry with the terminal despair of a man who never leaves his firelit study in some sturdy, formal estate, his little cottage (below) is really kind of cheery and resembles something out of Peter Jackson’s Shire (though Hardy’s “Max Gate” home in Dorchester is exactly what I picture him in).

The Writers’ Houses site allows you to browse by author, state, and city, with a separate category for “international houses.” Its main page is a regular blog with a wealth of current information on writers’ homes, replete with links to other sites and sources. For lovers of travel and architectural and literary history, this is not to be missed.

via Kottke

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

in Books, Literature, Writing | December 10th, 2012

Image by Angela Radulescu via Wikimedia Commons

It is sometimes the case that a favorite writer isn’t terribly interesting when it comes to talking shop. This has never been so with the self-revealing Toni Morrison, whose public appearances and interviews often duplicate the experience of reading one of her novels—her voice draws you in, and before you know it, you’re part of a world all her own that she has given you the privilege of joining for a short time.

This is the experience of reading her interview with Elissa Schappell in the Paris Review. Morrison discourses on subjects ranging from her personal routine and history, to her identity as a writer and a woman, to the larger history of slavery and the black lives she writes about. Woven through it all are observations about her art that may or may not be of any use to budding writers, but which will certainly make lovers of Morrison read her work a little differently. Some of her observations are below:

Write when you know you’re at your best. For her, this happened to be the early morning, pre-dawn hours, before her children woke up, since she worked full-time and feels she is “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Morrison describes her morning ritual this way:

I always get and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come.

“There’s a line between revising and fretting” It’s important for a writer to know when they are “fretting,” because if something isn’t working, “it needs to be scrapped,” although in answer to whether she goes back over published work and wishes she had fretted more, Morrison answers, “a lot. Everything.”
A good editor is “like a priest or a psychiatrist.” Morrison worked as an editor for Random House for 20 years before she published her first novel. She observes the relationship between writer and editor by saying that getting the wrong one means that “you are better off alone.” One of the marks of a good editor? She doesn’t “love you or your work,” therefore offers criticism, not compliments.
Don’t write with an audience in mind, write for the characters. Knowing how to read your own work—with the critical distance of a good reader—makes you a “better writer and editor.” For Morrison, this means writing not with an audience in mind, but with the characters to go to for advice, to tell you “if the rendition of their lives is authentic or not.”
Control your characters. Despite the ever-present and clichéd demand to “write what you know,” Morrison studiously tries to avoid taking character traits from people she knows. As she puts it: “making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people’s lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.” And as for keeping control of her characters, Morrison says “They have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves. So you can’t let them write your book for you.”
Plot is like melody; it doesn’t need to be complicated. Morrison sums up her approach to plot in Jazz and The Bluest Eye by saying “I put the whole plot on the first page.” Rather than constructing intricate plots with hidden twists, she prefers to think of the plot in musical terms as a “melody,” where the satisfaction lies in recognizing it and then hearing the “echoes and shades and turns and pivots” around it.
Style, like jazz, involves endless practice and restraint. Speaking of Jazz, Morrison tells she has always thought of herself like a jazz musician, “someone who practices and practices and practices in order to able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful.” A large part of her “jazz” style, she says, is “an exercise in restraint, in holding back.”
Be yourself, but be aware of tradition. Of the diversity of African-American jazz musicians and singers, Morrison says “I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.”

Most readers of Morrison’s work would argue that’s exactly what she’s done her whole career. Read the entire interview here and be sure to visit the complete archive of Paris Review interviews online.

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Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips for Teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1967)

in Literature, Writing | November 29th, 2012

Few who dip into Kurt Vonnegut’s work come away without the influence of his voice. If we can judge by his letter to Richard Gehman (click here to read it in large format), this will go for his personal correspondence as much as it does for his fiction. In addition to such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut left behind a great many letters, some of the most interesting of which have just come together in a new 464-page collection. We previously featured one of Vonnegut’s dispatches from the army, written to his parents at age 22. 22 years after that, he wrote the above page to Gehman, himself a noted man of letters. It contains the one thing for which nearly ever dedicated reader of Kurt Vonnegut must long: advice from Kurt Vonnegut.

“Mornings are for writing,” Vonnegut tells Gehman, “and so are most of the afternoons.” The recipient was preparing for a teaching stint at the University of Iowa’s famous Writer’s Workshop. Vonnegut’s own tour of duty there from 1965 to 1967 put him in a position to offer wise counsel. “The classes don’t matter much,” he writes, a sentiment that will strike creative writing teachers as at once dispiriting and sensible. “The real business, head-to-head, is done during office hours.” He also has much to say about university life and how to cope with the remoteness of Iowa City. “Forget your lack of credentials.” “You go to Cedar Rapids for seafood.” “Cancel classes whenever you damn please.” “Every so often you will go nuts. All of a sudden the cornfields get you.” “Run with the painters. I did.” “Go to all the football games. They are great.” Beyond these points, the letter only gets juicier — as a true Vonnegut fan would expect. Again you can read it in large format here.

via Slate

Kurt Vonnegut Reads from Slaughterhouse-Five

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

Kurt Vonnegut: “How To Get A Job Like Mine” (2002)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Best Music to Write By: Give Us Your Recommendations

in Books, Literature, Music, Writing | November 16th, 2012

Writing is hard. It’s hard to begin, hard to continue, hard to finish. To write successfully and consistently requires an alchemical combination of discipline and inspiration so personal that reading advice on the subject amounts to watching someone else die to learn how it’s done. And while it often feels enlightening to read about the habits of, say, Steinbeck or Austen, their methods are non-transferable. You’ve got to find your own way. So it is with writing to music. It’s always there in the background, goading you on quietly. Not everyone writes to music; not everyone can. But a good many do, including Wired contributor Steve Silberman who calls the practice one of many rituals writers use “to evoke that elusive flow of inspiration.”

Silberman just wrote a piece for NeuroTribes in which he surveyed ten authors on their favorite music to write by. One of Silberman’s own choices, Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (above), is one I’m stealing. With its brilliant assemblage of musicians and haunting moodiness it sets the perfect tone for my process. Also, there’s no singing. Like Silberman, I can’t compete with a wise, witty lyricist (he mentions Elvis Costello, I prefer Morrissey). In Silberman’s piece, John Schwartz, a New York Times reporter, listens to nothing. Jane Hirschfield, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, likes David Byrne, Dylan’s Modern Times, and Gillians Welch’s The Harrow and the Harvest. Wired contributing editor David Wolman makes a playlist of mostly indie-pop songs entitled “Write the Book!” His main criterion for the songs he chooses: DO NOT BE BORING! My default writing music is exemplified by Australian three-piece instrumental rock band Dirty Three (below).

So now it’s your turn, readers. Do you write to music? If so, what is it? What artists/composers/albums help you find your rhythm and why? Can you stand lyrics in the music you write by or no? Leave your selections in the comments. On Monday, we’ll compile them in an article and leave you with a great Open Culture playlist. Whether you find something you can steal or not, it should be a fun exercise.

*See our follow-up post with a list of your favorites here

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 81 ) |

Woody Allen’s Typewriter, Scissors and Stapler: The Great Filmmaker Shows Us How He Writes

Author Gary Shteyngart Reveals Why He Willingly Blurbs His Brains Out

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

What’s the Deal with Pop Tarts? Jerry Seinfeld Explains How to Write a Joke

Writers’ Houses Gives You a Virtual Tour of Famous Authors’ Homes

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

Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips for Teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1967)

The Best Music to Write By: Give Us Your Recommendations

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