by Lydia Davis
a. Little kitty crouches down and flattens her ears (in the entryway, in front of the glass door) so that she won’t be seen by the dead leaves whirling around outside.
b. Grandpa is over there under the tree working on his retractable umbrella.
c. That very handsome dark-haired and dark-eyed young man walks up and down the aisle of the train so many times to show us how nice he looks in his cream-colored summer suit and white shirt. He will continue to walk up and down until he is sure we have all seen him.
(In this case, the observation has already turned into something a little more, even as I write it, because I am adding something to it that I imagine, or can pretend I imagine, about the man.)
Observe the weather, and be specific.
From my notebook:
a. High wind yesterday blew women’s long hair, women’s long skirts, crowns of trees, at dinner outdoors napkins off laps, lettuce off plates, flakes of pastry off plates onto sidewalk.
Apropos of weather and precision, here is the 1970 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’s chart of the Beaufort scale—a scale in which the force of the wind is indicated by numbers from 0 to 12. This source is “just” a dictionary, but the images are vivid because of their specificity and the good clear writing in the dictionary, and because the increasing strength of the wind on the scale becomes, despite the dry, factual account, dramatic.
I have to say, as an aside, that I’m sure I learned something about writing clear and exact prose from the very precise definitions in this same dictionary, which I acquired at age twenty-five and consulted constantly.
Observe other types of behavior, including that of municipalities.
From my notebook, while traveling:
a. To commemorate the Saint-Cyprien victims of the flood of 1875, the city erected … a fountain.
(I revised this, in the notebook: I changed the order a little to avoid a succession of prepositional phrases. My sentence originally read: “To commemorate the victims in Saint-Cyprien of the flood of 1875, the city erected … a fountain.” That version may, after all, be perfectly all right, or even better.)
Note facts.
As a writer, whether you are writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, you must be responsible for accurate factual information about how a thing works, if you’re writing about it. You will have to be well informed about such things as the weather, biology, botany, human nature, history, technology; such matters as color spectrums and the behavior of light waves, etc., etc. This means that, over time, you will learn a good deal. Here’s an example of a piece of knowledge acquired while traveling:
Question: can you figure out three reasons why trees were planted along this canal in a French city?
My answer, noted in my notebook:
a. trees planted along canal for three reasons: shade for boatmen, help slow evaporation of water, hold earth in banks. Often planted at exactly equal intervals.
Note technical/historical facts.
Here are some notes I took in the Cluny Museum in Paris, about construction methods in ancient Rome:
a. “Courses of limestone (rows) intersected by leveling courses (bands) of horizontal bricks forming a construction named opus vittatum mixtum [banded mixed work], a reference to the layering techniques and to the mixing of different materials.”
b. “The floor … is made of Roman concrete, opus caementicium, a mix of stones and lime mortar … probably covered in stone slabs or mosaics.”
Important: Take notes at the time, because you will forget much, if not everything, later—you will inevitably either forget the moment entirely or forget a part of it, so it won’t be as complete or interesting when you do note it down.
a. Here is Samuel Johnson on the subject of travel writing: “He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require vigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge.”
On the subject of taking notes, I want to add one last thing, and that is about public transportation: I do a lot of writing and note-taking on trips: in airports, on airplanes, on trains. I recommend taking public transportation whenever possible. There are many good reasons to do this (one’s carbon footprint—on the ground, in any case—one’s safety, productive use of time, support of public transportation, etc.), but for a writer, here are two in particular: (1) you will write a good deal more waiting for a bus or sitting on a train than you will driving a car, or as a passenger in a car; and (2) you will be thrown in with strangers—people not of your choosing. Although I pass strangers when I’m walking on a city street, it is only while traveling on public transportation that I sit thigh-to-thigh with them on a subway, share the armrest with them between our airplane seats for hours on end, stare at the back of their heads waiting in line, and overhear sometimes extended conversations. It takes me out of my own limited, chosen world. Sometimes I have good, enlightening conversations with them.
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2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques, thus my notation above, taken down in the Cluny Museum. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.
Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.
This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.
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3. Be mostly self-taught.
There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.
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4. Revise notes constantly—try to develop the ability to read them as though you had never seen them before, to see how well they communicate. Constant revision, whether or not you’re going to “do” anything with what you’ve written, also teaches you to write better in the first place, when you first write something down.
I have already given some examples of revision, since it is an inveterate habit of mine when I reread anything I’ve written. I will give more examples as I go along and explain more about the importance of this later.
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5. If you take notes regularly, sitting in an airport, for example, you can “grow” a story right then and there. Revising it, you can give it a good shape and pace. Here are some notes I took sitting in an airport lounge at a table near a Starbucks. They later turned into a finished story. They begin with some dialogue I hear that strikes me:
a. “Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?”
“Sorry?”
“Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?” (I look up; it is a tall slim woman with a ponytail buying the drink. She’s an airline employee in the Starbucks line.)
Long pause for deliberation.
“I’ll take the drizzle.”
(I see her now from behind, over there, her blond ponytail and sticking-out ears, drinking her caramel drizzle. As she deliberated, I was deciding that drizzle was a smaller amount of caramel than “syrup,” even though “syrup” must be involved in the “drizzle.”)
Later, she walks away with another airline employee, th
e empty cup in her hand, the caramel drizzle inside her.
And then she turns out to be the attendant on our flight—her name is Shannon—so her caramel drizzle will also be going to Chicago with us.
In between my observations of the flight attendant, there were other notes, first a comment about something I had experienced trying to learn Dutch, and then another “people” observation, as follows:
b. Stout, cheerful, rather dandyish man dressed in preppy clothes—tweed jacket, bow tie, loafers, etc.—starts off down the airport corridor in pursuit of a boy of six or seven in camouflage clothes who is galloping away. Stout man calls cheerfully back to woman at table, who is evidently boy’s mother: “James and I are going potty!”
Then I go back to observing the stewardess.
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6. Taking notes as you sit outside at a café table, you can also begin to develop a poem. This is the same wind as noted before, at the same café table. I did not write it to be a poem, but later I think it almost reads as one:
a. In the wind, the grass is bowing and the Queen Anne’s lace is nodding.
Now, as though blown by the wind, come the runners in the footrace.
Here is how the revision worked: Originally I did not have “In the wind” at the beginning. I was sitting there in the wind, I knew it was windy, I knew why the grass and the Queen Anne’s lace were bowing and nodding. But when I read it over with fresh eyes, I could see that I needed to say the wind was blowing; otherwise the reader might hesitate or take time figuring out why the grass and flowers were moving. You want the impact of what you write to be unobstructed; you don’t want confusion or hesitation in the reader’s mind.
I say “the reader” for convenience, by the way. The fact is that when I revise in my notebook, I’m revising for the sake of the piece itself, to make it work. I’m not thinking about any reader. I may never do any more with it than leave it in the notebook.
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7. Another advantage of revising constantly, regardless of whether you’re ever going to do anything more with what you’ve written, is that you practice, constantly, reading with fresh eyes, reading as the person coming fresh to this, never having seen it before. This is a very important skill to develop, and one that probably develops only with time and practice (although some people recommend various tricks, such as printing different drafts of your work in different fonts).
Another way to see your work freshly is to leave it alone and come back to it after time has passed. I will quite often begin a piece of writing, even hastily, getting a few lines or sentences down, with a title, and then leave it and work on other things, and sometimes I leave it for so long—weeks or months—that when I see the title again I wonder what it is, and even when I read it I don’t recognize it, having completely forgotten it existed.
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8. Sentences or ideas reported from reality out of context can be wonderful. But then, when and if you use them in a piece of finished writing, beware of how much context you give them.
Context can mean explanation, exposition. And too much of it can take away all the interest the material originally had. Here are some more notes, effective alone, without context, less effective with context:
More notebook entries:
a. “When Maris was in his sixties, he often seemed tired of life.” (from Wikipedia article about the Dutch painter Willem Maris)
b. “Another of Tennyson’s brothers, Edward Tennyson, was institutionalized at a private asylum, where he was deemed dead.” (from Wikipedia article on Tennyson)
c. “Alas I’m in Denver.” (email)
d. “I can always get someone to open a window in Paris.” (email from schoolmate about learning French)
e. “The children at The Children’s Center are interested in building a castle.” (email)
In this last example, part of the vividness of the entry is the language: the repetition of children and then the word interested, which somehow seems an odd choice for characterizing the children here. And then the picture conjured up by children building a (real) castle. This would not have been as striking if the situation as a whole had been more fully explained and the language had been slightly changed, thus: “The children at the day-care center want to build a castle out of blocks.”
f. “I need a plumber.” (email)
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9. Go to primary sources and go to the great works to learn technique. This was the advice of Matsuo Bashō, the seventeenth-century Japanese master of the haiku.
Read the best writers. Maybe it would help to set a goal of one classic per year at least. Classics have stood the test of time, as we say. Keep trying them; if you don’t like them at first, come back to them. I tried Joyce’s Ulysses three times before I read it all the way through. (It helped that I was living in Ireland at the time, where I saw Joycean and Beckettian characters all around me.) I haven’t yet read Don Quixote, but I think I’ll actually enjoy it. There is a lot more to say about learning from the best writers, and I’ll say a little more in a moment.
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10. How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.
You should be reading a lot—reading different kinds of books but also reading in different ways: sometimes fast, and sometimes slowly. Sometimes just absorbing what you are reading, losing yourself; at other times analyzing as you read, developing your awareness of how a writer achieves an effect; sometimes stopping to analyze closely just one sentence or one paragraph.
Digression on analysis
Examples of analysis:
a. I used to do this with the Dr. Donahue health column in the daily paper where I lived. Why did I have the impression that Dr. Donahue, in his column, was so caring, so sympathetic? I would read the column sentence by sentence from the beginning to find out. Much of it was neutral, clearly presented medical information that might have turned cooler or warmer at any moment. But then came the note of caring; it involved the use of the second person—“you”—and then the advice: “You will want to make sure you leave the compress on for five minutes.” Along with the advice there might come a note of self-deprecation: “It sounds ridiculous to ask an exhausted person to exercise.” Despite being the expert, he never sounded superior.
b. Much more recently I was analyzing the humor of the British novelist Barbara Pym, a writer I enjoy: I would start at the beginning of a chapter and proceed, again, one sentence at a time. She was not funny, not yet, she was rather neutral, and then—aha, there it was, the first funny moment. And then I would ask, How does she do it?
Incongruity is at the heart of humor, so often. In the following example, it’s the contrast between the gravity of the first statement, which raises our expectations of serious news, and the anticlimax or change of register in the second statement. I can’t find the passage, so I’ll have to approximate it.
Two people are sitting together and talking at a church reception. One is a man very involved in the internal affairs of the church. The other is a woman, the narrator, a visitor to the town attending the reception out of courtesy.
He said: “I have had serious news.”
“Oh,” I asked, alarmed. “What is it?”
He leaned toward me and lowered his voice: “There is a fungus growing on the walls of the choir vestry.”
You may not find that funny; maybe one has to have been following the story from the beginning and also to have become completely attuned to Pym’s quiet and constant humor. And one’s sense of humor is an individual thing, in any case.
I’m analyzing just how Barbara Pym achieves her funny moments, not because I want to learn to be funny, but just because it interests me. But I also know that close analysis is in itself instructive. Please remember that. Analyzing, in itself, will sharpen your perceptions and sharpen you
r skills as a writer.
Analyzing will help you solve problems: if you have trouble with endings, read and analyze endings; if you have trouble with lush descriptions, see how descriptions function for different writers. For any problem you have, there will be an answer in the close analysis of one or more good writers.
Read closely, and learn to analyze texts.
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11. Other books to have on hand:
Books of writing exercises, if you find them useful. One I like is Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A.M. Epiphany. He has not only exercises to do but also little stories of his own experience to go with them.
When you aren’t inspired to work on whatever it is you should be working on, do an exercise, or a series of them. Make up your own exercises. Do them even if you feel dull and unimaginative. Something may come of it, and it is better than doing nothing.
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12. Important practical tip: After a session of writing, leave some clear time in which you can note down what your brain will continue to offer you. In other words, do not go directly from writing to lunch with friends or to a class. Do not go straight to your emails or your phone. Leave at least fifteen minutes completely open. Do the dishes or take a walk or a shower—do something physical in which you can remain open to your random thoughts. Your brain will offer you a few more good ideas during this time. Don’t lose them by silencing them with other activities.
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13. If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. Rather, work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think. This was Stendhal’s advice. Actually, he said: “If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.” Where did I find this quote? In my New Basics Cookbook.