Seasons of the Palm, novel by Perumal Murugan

“Shorty looks up at the palm tree. It is a male tree. Four clay pots cluster at the top, collecting wine. The tree is almost bare, except for a swathe of fresh, green fronds ringed by aging brown leaves — a scraggly, thin, baby crow, with no down yet on its back. Kandamoopan is heartless when it comes to male trees. He chops at the fronds, till the tree is almost barren. But with female trees, he is different. He is tender, solicitous, as if they are pregnant women given to his care. He lets their fronds grow, until they form a huge whirl. Rarely does he take out his knife, he is happy to let it rest in its rusty holder.”

From Seasons of the Palm by PERUMAL MURUGAN

Set in rural India, Seasons of the Palm tells the story of Shorty, a young dalit (untouchable) farm hand. The author (Perumal Murugan) — who was born into a dominant caste and writes as a critical insider — has  great empathy for his protagonist, who  alternates between a harsh existence in the outer world and a happy life in his dream world.

Palm Latitudes, novel by Kate Braverman

“My life was an arc between darkness and irradiated clarity, an unpredictable and brutal journey. I felt as if I were a stranger to this earth. No, not merely this collection of angles, streets and alleys named Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles. I was estranged not from a particular season or region, a climate or a barrio, but from the planet itself. I stood motionless on my front lawn, humbled by sun, wind or fog, a passing sparrow. I heard the sighs of trees in their inviolate dominion where the sky is pearl, glazed, a mesa of puffy clouds tracked by wild gulls that could if they chose, shriek your name and the hour and latitude of your birth. I thought all women lived like this, in a torment of concurrencies.”

KATE BRAVERMAN, Palm Latitudes

Painting: ”En Vakker Dag” (“A Beautiful Day”) by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Last lines of Post Office, novel by Charles Bukowski

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.

Last Lines from Post Office (1971) by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

8 Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut

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.

8 Writing Tips from Neil Gaiman

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.

Neil Gaiman is the author of American Gods (2001) and Coraline (2002). 

Illustration: Becky Walker, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

10 Writing Tips 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 programand 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.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of the bestselling novels The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010).

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

Haruki Murakami Translates F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 2006, Haruki Murakami – author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — accomplished a long-standing goal by translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Murakami has discussed his reverence for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel many times over the years — and has written a compelling afterword to his translation. Read Murakami’s moving love letter to Fitzgerald’s masterwork at scribd.com.

Here are some excerpts from Murakami’s heartfelt homage to The Great Gatsby…

When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby. It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Through slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections.

Remarks such as these are bound to perplex more than a few readers. ‘Look, Murakami,’ they’ll say, ‘I read the novel, and I don’t get it. Just why do you think it’s so great?’ My first impulse is to challenge them right back. ‘Hey, if The Great Gatsby isn’t great,’ I am tempted to say, inching closer, ‘then what the heck is?’…Gatsby is such a finely wrought novel – its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered – that, in the end, one has to study it line by line in English to appreciate its true value.”

Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Read by Michael Caine

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”

RAYMOND CHANDLER, Farewell My Lovely

May is “Get Caught Reading” month, and during the past few weeks we’ve posted a range of familiar faces reading a variety of books. In the photo above, Michael Caine — in the role of Jack Carter in the 1971 movie Get Carter — reads Raymond Chandler‘s 1940 novel Farewell My Lovely. And, as the excerpt at the top of his post proves, Chandler was a master of the original metaphor.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Love Affair with Cars

Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, 1923, in the sports coupé the author purchased a few years earlier after selling his first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

“When I was a boy, I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

According to an insightful 1993 article entitled “The Automobile as a Central Symbol in F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Luis Girón Echevarría:

“The cars in Fitzgerald’s life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy between the dream and reality of his life, as well as his waning fortunes, and his journey from careless, irresponsible youth to cautious, worried middle-age…

His first car, purchased in 1920 after the publication of his best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a three-year-oíd sports coupé; during the next two decades he would own a used Rolls-Royce, an oíd Buick, [a] Stutz, a nine-year-old Packard, an oíd 1934 Ford coupé, and, finally, a second-hand 1937 Ford convertible…

It was Fitzgerald’s destiny to begin life dreaming of a magnificent red Stutz Bearcat and to end up driving a second-hand Ford. But during the interval he wrote of America’s dreams and of America’s enduring love affair with the automobile.”

Read more of this fascinating article here.