Summer Afternoon with Henry James

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

                                HENRY JAMES

Illustration by Ray Ferrer, Urban Wall Art. Visit Ferrer’s website here.

Writing Advice from Henry Miller

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
3. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
4. When you can’t create, you can work.
5. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
6. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
7. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
8. Discard the program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
9. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
10. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Writing Fiction

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word “then” as a ­conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than “The Meta­morphosis”.
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8.  It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Illustration by Danilo Agutoli, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find more of Agutoli’s work here.

Post Office Musings

RED BIRTHMARK
Standing in the post office
with a tiny man in front of me
his hair dyed a too-black black
I towered over him &
could see his scalp peeking through the black fringe.
I spotted a red birthmark there
I stood taller to get a better glimpse
but the line kept moving up &
the man shuffled forward
disturbing my view.
I had just seen something
this man would never see
(except maybe in a two-way mirror) –
the top of his head &
the red birthmark
that glows beneath the dyed black hair
like the bright promise of his soul.

Writing Advice from E.L. Doctorow

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

E.L. DOCTOROW

PHOTO: Rosecrans Drive-In, Paramount, 1993 by Hiroshi Sugimoto; Deutsche Bank Collection

Writing Advice from Bukowski

SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER

by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Drawing: Self-portrait by Charles Bukowski (photo by Marshall Astor)

Sunset with T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table…

Opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

Photo: Sunset at Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, Canada by Andrew PMK

Neil Gaiman’s Writing Advice

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Illustration: Becky Walker, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Advice

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.

Cat People

“If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” MARK TWAIN

Illustration: “Cats with Beards” by Michael C. Hsiung, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Visit Michael’s website here.