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

in Literature, Writing | July 26th, 2019

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

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

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

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

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Content:

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

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Anton Chekhov’s Six Rules For Writing Fiction

in Writing | July 3rd, 2019

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

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

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

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

Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature;
Total objectivity;
Truthful description of persons and objects;
Extreme brevity;
Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype;
Compassion

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

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

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

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

via Brain Pickings

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

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Steven Pinker’s 13 Rules for Good Writing

in Writing | March 27th, 2019

Photo by Rose Lincoln, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

via Big Think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via The Public Domain Review

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

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The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear

in Writing | February 8th, 2019

The United Nations, as you may or may not know, has designated 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. By fortunate coincidence, this year also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Alphabets Project. In 2009, its founder writes, “times were dark for indigenous and minority cultures.” Television and the internet had driven “a kind of cultural imperialism into every corner of the world. Everyone had a screen or wanted a screen, and the English language and the Latin alphabet (or one of the half-dozen other major writing systems) were on every screen and every keyboard” — putting at a great disadvantage those who could only read and write, say, Mandombe, Wancho, or Hanifi Rohingya.

2019, by contrast, turns out to be “a remarkable time in the history of writing systems” when, “in spite of creeping globalization, political oppression, and economic inequalities, minority cultures are starting to revive interest in their traditional scripts.”

A variety of these scripts have found new lives as the material for works of art and design, and they’ve also received new waves of preservation-minded attention from activist groups and governments alike. But that doesn’t guarantee their survival through the 21st century, an unfortunate fact toward which the Endangered Alphabets Project’s Atlas of Endangered Alphabets exists to draw attention.

Not all the scripts included in the Atlas are alphabets — “some are abjads, or abugidas, or syllabaries. A couple are even pictographic systems” — but all lack “official status in their country, state, or province” and “are not taught in government-funded schools.” All once enjoyed “widespread acceptance and use within their cultural and linguistic community,” but none do any longer, and though none are actually extinct, all suffer from endangerment as a consequence of their declining or emerging status (as well as, often, of “being dominated, bullied, ignored, or actively persecuted by another, more powerful culture”). You can explore the endangered languages by scrolling, zooming, and clicking the world map on the atlas’ front page.

Or you can browse them all, from Adlam to Zo, on an alphabetically ordered list — ordered, of course, by the Roman alphabet, but full of examples of writing systems that differ in many and often surprising ways from it. Take, for example, the African Ditema tsa Dinoko script, which allows the writer to express with not just shape but color. Developed between 2010 and 2015 to write southern Bantu languages, it takes its forms from southern African murals of the kind painted by Esther Mahlangu, whose BMW art car appears in the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets’ gallery. BMW might consider commissioning another one emblazoned with official Ditema tsa Dinoko letters. With promotion that snazzy, what writing system could possibly go extinct?

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course

in Online Courses, Writing | January 30th, 2019

How has Neil Gaiman, author of fiction in a variety of forms ranging from novels and short stories to comic books, radio plays, and films, managed to win over such a large and devoted fan base? Ask a member of that fan base, and you’ll more than likely hear an explanation along the lines of, “He knows how to tell a story.” That may sound like a simple skill, but telling a story at Gaiman’s level requires a deep-rooted expertise in the essential nature and still-unexplored possibilities of storytelling itself — an expertise that Gaiman himself has lately proven more than willing to share. A few years ago we featured his lecture “How Stories Last” here on Open Culture; now, he’s come out with an online course on the art of storytelling at MasterClass.

“Human beings are storytelling creatures,” Gaiman says in the course’s trailer above. “Stories are vital. We convey truth with stories. That is the magic of fiction.” But even the author of stories like The Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and much more besides has certain admissions to make about the practice of writing them: “Writing a novel is like driving through the fog with one headlight out,” for example.

“You can’t see very far ahead of yourself. But every now and again, the mists will clear.” And when it comes time to revise, he explains, “the process of doing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.” What do you need most to make it through this harrowing process? The “conviction that you are brilliant.”

Not that you don’t need anything else. The nineteen lessons of Gaiman’s MasterClass cover everything from “using the ‘lie’ of a made-up story to tell a human truth,” to “how to overcome the fear of making mistakes,” to techniques like “cold opens, withholding information, finding emotional weight, and choosing memorable details,” to the art of worldbuilding, which Gaiman describes as “honestly, the joy of getting to play god.” Other lessons provide case studies focusing on his short stories, novels, and comic books, all of which have no doubt inspired many to tell stories themselves. But who, hearing Gaiman talk about storytelling, could possibly resist trying their hand at it?

You can sign up for Gaiman’s course here.

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.

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.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

in Sci Fi, Writing | January 29th, 2019

Image by Gorthian, via Wikimedia Commons

“Some of us are Norman Mailer,” said Ursula K. LeGuin in a 1976 interview with science-fiction fanzine Luna Monthly, “but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives.” And though Le Guin may have thought of herself as one of the latter, “middle-aged Portland housewife” is hardly the way the rest of us would describe her. Over a nearly 60-year-long career, Le Guin produced an enormous body of literary work, including but not limited to the six books in which she created the world of Earthsea and other acclaimed sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. And somehow she managed to write all of it between 7:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. each day.

Or that’s what her ideal writing schedule dictates, anyway. Recently tweeted out by writer Michael J. Seidlinger as “the ideal writing routine,” it first appeared in an interview she gave in 1988 (and more recently reappeared in Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations).

Beginning at the early hour of 5:30 in the morning, the time to “wake up and lie there and think,” it continues on to breakfast — and “lots” of it — at 6:15, and the commencement of the day’s “writing, writing, writing” an hour later, which lasts until lunch at noon. After that, Le Guin considered what we consider her main work to be done, moving on to such pursuits as reading, music, correspondence, “maybe house cleaning,” and dinner. Past 8:15, she said, “I tend to be very stupid,” a state in which nobody could write the sort of books we remember her for.

But however originally she wrote, Le Guin was hardly exceptional in living this way while doing it. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” said Gustave Flaubert, a maxim true for enough writers that we also worked it in when we featured an infographic on the daily routines of famous creative people. In both Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haruki Murakami, who rises famously early and runs famously hard when working on a book), their domestic lives, well-ordered to the point that an outside observer would find them boring, facilitated the creation of literature like none that had ever come before. This despite the fact that, on the surface, few novels could seem more dissimilar than Flaubert and Le Guin’s, but each writer would have seen what the other had in common: specifically, that they knew what it took to get the imagination well and truly fired up.

via Michael J. Seidlinger

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

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

Anton Chekhov’s Six Rules For Writing Fiction

Steven Pinker’s 13 Rules for Good Writing

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

The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear

Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

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