Three new biographical studies of Ernest Hemingway are out, even though they may not be needed. The life of this overly celebrated writer has been thoroughly researched by many others. I am more interested in the writer than the man who became a brand name.
Hemingway remains, says Fintan O'Toole in the current New York Review of Books, a fascinating object of study: behind his "outlandish public image," O'Toole says, is a trauma caused by World War I and a complex sexuality that resulted in a hypermasculine swagger that I have commented on before. He became, in the words of his third wife, a "loathsome human being."
But was he also a genius? How influential is he today as a writer? Well, he has been a major influence on the modern short story, especially its style; he was a master of the story form and produced at least three significant novels (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and Old Man and the Sea) that reflect his cold-blooded view of human life in memorable tough-guy prose. Although he re-defined American prose fiction in the mid-20th century, he also wrote much that was disappointingly mediocre, the result probably of his drinking and multiple injuries.
Still, in his prime, Hemingway was a serious reader and fine craftsman who gave some valuable advice to writers. Having revised the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times, as he said in an interview, he reminds us of the importance of crafting each sentence carefully and revising the resulting paragraph.
Revise endlessly, he said: "The main thing is to know what to leave out."
He mastered the iceberg theory of literature whereby three-fourths of what happens in a story is unstated, implied, as in his famous six-word story: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."
"The way you can tell if you are good," he said, "is by what you can throw away." He claimed to throw away nine out of ten stories he wrote.
Since all style is personal, he said, "don't ever imitate anybody." Writers, of course, steal ideas freely from one another but not style, which has to suit the subject, as it does in Hemingway; it also reflects the author behind the words.
I think the wannabe author can learn many techniques from reading Hemingway, such as the use of dialogue to carry the action and the value of concise, understated sentences. His work is a reminder of the axiom that suggestion is more powerful than statement.
Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing advice. Show all posts
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Sound Advice for Writers
I am always glad to find well-known authors who agree with me, especially when it comes to writing. Although this is the first year in a while that I will not be teaching a summer workshop on style, I plan to return in 2014 and, of course, continue to write and help others, when I can, mainly with editing, having spent 45 years doing so.
I always tell my adult students that writing may be impossible to teach but that revising is not: it is what excites me, the chance to re-work sentences and play with them until they are more clear or expressive or concise. So the following statement by Susan Sontag was very welcome when it appeared in my "In" box not long ago:
"Though the rewriting--and the rereading--sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of 'literature' in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit."
The second meaningful quote is from Sebastian Junger: "Don't dump lazy sentences on your reader. If you do, they'll walk away. You have to push yourself to find powerful, original ways of describing things."
This brings us back to revision and the time required, and the honesty, to look at each sentence we have written and see if it sounds trite or wordy; how does it sound aloud? How can it be improved? Not being satisfied with a draft until it is as perfect as possible requires effort and time, more than the original drafting, in most cases.
Just recently, I completed the revision of a story--my first complete piece of fiction--to be published soon by the Provo Canyon Review, which asked that I prune it considerably. It took several weeks to consider which sections could be cut so that the 8,000-word story could be closer to 6,000. Painful work, letting go of sentences I had crafted a year before; yet as I finished the revision, I could see how much tighter, and better, the polished story now was. No doubt the editor, with his own perspective, will find other sentences to trim and, as with previous work of mine, I will be pleasantly surprised by the final product.
So, as Donald Murray has preached, there is no writing without rewriting.
I have encountered a number of wannabe authors who seem in a great hurry to get published, but they have not yet honed their own style. Perhaps they have not read enough to know what sounds right in a sentence. This brings me to my third quote, from fiction writer Jennifer Eagan:
"Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do."
If there is no writing without rewriting, there is also no writing without reading.
How can anyone write a crime novel or children's book without having read the best in the genre? This is not only professionally necessary but a source of stimulation in the ongoing interwoven web of reading and writing that is at the heart of the literary life.
If you are a writer reading this, I hope this advice, though perhaps familiar to you, will help you along the way.
I always tell my adult students that writing may be impossible to teach but that revising is not: it is what excites me, the chance to re-work sentences and play with them until they are more clear or expressive or concise. So the following statement by Susan Sontag was very welcome when it appeared in my "In" box not long ago:
"Though the rewriting--and the rereading--sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of 'literature' in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit."
The second meaningful quote is from Sebastian Junger: "Don't dump lazy sentences on your reader. If you do, they'll walk away. You have to push yourself to find powerful, original ways of describing things."
This brings us back to revision and the time required, and the honesty, to look at each sentence we have written and see if it sounds trite or wordy; how does it sound aloud? How can it be improved? Not being satisfied with a draft until it is as perfect as possible requires effort and time, more than the original drafting, in most cases.
Just recently, I completed the revision of a story--my first complete piece of fiction--to be published soon by the Provo Canyon Review, which asked that I prune it considerably. It took several weeks to consider which sections could be cut so that the 8,000-word story could be closer to 6,000. Painful work, letting go of sentences I had crafted a year before; yet as I finished the revision, I could see how much tighter, and better, the polished story now was. No doubt the editor, with his own perspective, will find other sentences to trim and, as with previous work of mine, I will be pleasantly surprised by the final product.
So, as Donald Murray has preached, there is no writing without rewriting.
I have encountered a number of wannabe authors who seem in a great hurry to get published, but they have not yet honed their own style. Perhaps they have not read enough to know what sounds right in a sentence. This brings me to my third quote, from fiction writer Jennifer Eagan:
"Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do."
If there is no writing without rewriting, there is also no writing without reading.
How can anyone write a crime novel or children's book without having read the best in the genre? This is not only professionally necessary but a source of stimulation in the ongoing interwoven web of reading and writing that is at the heart of the literary life.
If you are a writer reading this, I hope this advice, though perhaps familiar to you, will help you along the way.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
What's in a Title?
I have been thinking lately of book titles, looking over a little collection of memorable ones and wondering how important a great title is for a book.
This topic has a connection with something that writers often fear, at least unconsciously (I know I used to): How can I possibly say anything original?
It's true that most of the great themes--love and war and jealousy and greed--have been well mined over the centuries; yet each writer of fiction brings his or her own experience and perspective and style to the subject. As Tolstoy said in the famous opening of "Anna Karenina": every family is unhappy in its own way.
There are endless permutations of unhappiness, alas, and so material to keep fiction writers free of the worry that there is nothing new under the sun. And as for my area, non-fiction, the Internet is a daily demonstration of the infinite variety of topics that the layperson can learn about and address. This blog, in fact, is mainly a series of reactions to things I have been reading. Most writing of this type is a creative exchange and borrowing. ("Good writers borrow, great writers steal.")
Back to titles: many great works have plain, ordinary titles that end up capturing the essence of a book: Great Expectations, for example, or Middlemarch (a pedestrian title for a great novel). Shakespeare put little imagination into his titles, which, except for Much Ado about Nothing and maybe one or two others, are unexciting. So if we can't judge a book by its
cover, we can't predict too much from a title. Great titles can promise much more than they deliver. Others are just right. I have been skimming a new novel by Amor Towles, Rules of Civility, which perfectly suits his unique story of Manhattan cafe society in 1938.
So my advice to writers: Don't worry about the title of your story, novel or article or whatever: it will emerge, often as you complete the text. Or your editor or publisher will suggest one. Often I have seen in films a struggling author sitting at an old typewriter and beginning with the title and his name; afterwards he is stuck and angrily begins again. This is not how writers work!
As for great titles that are memorable, some are poetic (From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.), some clever, offbeat, or wacky. Here is my list of favorites:
1. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
2. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
3. Vile Bodies
4. Flaubert's Parrot
5. Where the Wild Things Are
6. Paradise Lost
7. The Sound and the Fury
8. Welcome to the Monkey House
9. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
10. The Kalahari Typing School for Men
11. Tears of the Giraffe
12. Reusing Old Graves
13. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
14. A History of Lesbian Hair
15. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
This last one, simple but just right, is not clever or poetic or whimsical, just a memorably concise indicator of Gibbon's history. Much the same for Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.
One of my all-time favorites is a little-known import from the U.K. by Alan Coren, GOLFING WITH CATS, which has nothing to do with either golf or cats but, as the author indicates in his Preface, these subjects attract book buyers, so he put them, along with a swastica, on the cover. (Cats, as I learned with my Writing with Cats, sell books.) This is a good example of a title being greater than the book, which was not a bestseller.
What makes a bestseller? A lot more than the title. But I can't resist the joke about how, in non-fiction, an ideal title would be: "How to Lose Weight, Get Rich, and Find God." If only I could work cats into that one....
This topic has a connection with something that writers often fear, at least unconsciously (I know I used to): How can I possibly say anything original?
It's true that most of the great themes--love and war and jealousy and greed--have been well mined over the centuries; yet each writer of fiction brings his or her own experience and perspective and style to the subject. As Tolstoy said in the famous opening of "Anna Karenina": every family is unhappy in its own way.
There are endless permutations of unhappiness, alas, and so material to keep fiction writers free of the worry that there is nothing new under the sun. And as for my area, non-fiction, the Internet is a daily demonstration of the infinite variety of topics that the layperson can learn about and address. This blog, in fact, is mainly a series of reactions to things I have been reading. Most writing of this type is a creative exchange and borrowing. ("Good writers borrow, great writers steal.")
Back to titles: many great works have plain, ordinary titles that end up capturing the essence of a book: Great Expectations, for example, or Middlemarch (a pedestrian title for a great novel). Shakespeare put little imagination into his titles, which, except for Much Ado about Nothing and maybe one or two others, are unexciting. So if we can't judge a book by its
cover, we can't predict too much from a title. Great titles can promise much more than they deliver. Others are just right. I have been skimming a new novel by Amor Towles, Rules of Civility, which perfectly suits his unique story of Manhattan cafe society in 1938.
So my advice to writers: Don't worry about the title of your story, novel or article or whatever: it will emerge, often as you complete the text. Or your editor or publisher will suggest one. Often I have seen in films a struggling author sitting at an old typewriter and beginning with the title and his name; afterwards he is stuck and angrily begins again. This is not how writers work!
As for great titles that are memorable, some are poetic (From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.), some clever, offbeat, or wacky. Here is my list of favorites:
1. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
2. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
3. Vile Bodies
4. Flaubert's Parrot
5. Where the Wild Things Are
6. Paradise Lost
7. The Sound and the Fury
8. Welcome to the Monkey House
9. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
10. The Kalahari Typing School for Men
11. Tears of the Giraffe
12. Reusing Old Graves
13. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
14. A History of Lesbian Hair
15. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
This last one, simple but just right, is not clever or poetic or whimsical, just a memorably concise indicator of Gibbon's history. Much the same for Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.
One of my all-time favorites is a little-known import from the U.K. by Alan Coren, GOLFING WITH CATS, which has nothing to do with either golf or cats but, as the author indicates in his Preface, these subjects attract book buyers, so he put them, along with a swastica, on the cover. (Cats, as I learned with my Writing with Cats, sell books.) This is a good example of a title being greater than the book, which was not a bestseller.
What makes a bestseller? A lot more than the title. But I can't resist the joke about how, in non-fiction, an ideal title would be: "How to Lose Weight, Get Rich, and Find God." If only I could work cats into that one....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)