Jack Kerouac’s Advice to Writers

JACK KEROUAC’S ADVICE TO WRITERS

Believe in the holy contour of life.

Photo: Tom Wolbers, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Tip

WRITING TIP FROM KURT VONNEGUT

Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water. 

Photo: CelloPics

Flannery O’Connor’s Writing Habits

FLANNERY O’CONNOR TALKS ABOUT HER WRITING HABITS: “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.” 

Illustration: Tin House, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Truman Capote’s Writing Process

TRUMAN CAPOTE TALKS ABOUT HIS WRITING PROCESS: 

“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch…I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.”

The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

Getting Catty with Capote

TRUMAN CAPOTE OFFERS HIS OPINIONS ABOUT OTHER WRITERS: “Thackeray’s a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

(Excerpt from Novella)

by Truman Capote

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. 

Review: “Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.”

Norman Mailer

Find the book at Amazon.com.

Photo: Manhattan Girl, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

John O’Hara Offers His View of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together.”

JOHN O’HARA writing to JOHN STEINBECK,

as quoted in The Selected Letters of John O’Hara (1978)

Raymond Chandler Talks About F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it’s a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes.”

RAYMOND CHANDLER referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1950 letter to a friend

Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-88103 DLC.

The Meek Shall Inherit…Poem by Richard Brautigan

THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH’S BEER BOTTLES

Poem by Richard Brautigan

When we were children after the war
we lived for a year in a house next
to a large highway. There were many
sawmills and log ponds on the other side
of the highway. The sound of the saws could
be heard most of the time and when there
was darkness trash burners glowed red
against the sky. We did not have a father
and our mother had to work very hard.
My sister and I got our spending money
by gathering beer bottles that had been
thrown along the highway or left around
the sawmills. At first we carried the
bottles in gunny sacks and cardboard boxes
but later we found an old baby buggy
and we used that to carry our bottles in.
We took the bottles to a grocery store
and were paid a penny for small beer bottles
and two cents for large ones. On almost
any day we could be seen pushing our baby
buggy along the highway looking
for beer bottles. 

 

But Where’s the Cat?…by Philip K. Dick

“But let me tell you my cat joke. It’s very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room — has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak-and it’s gone. And there’s the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing its face.”

“The cat got the steak,” Barney said.

“Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. ‘Weigh the cat,’ someone says. They’ve had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, ‘okay, that’s it. There’s the steak.’

They’re satisfied that they know what happened, now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, ‘But where’s the cat?”’

From The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich by PHILIP K. DICK

Photo: Philip K. Dick and feline friend.