1. Advanced Writing II Spring 2010 Tuesdays, 3:30-5:20pm

2. What is writing? 3. a physical act. 4. set in stone 5. set in stone The Abu Salbikh Tablet Circa 2500 BCE A Sumerian wisdom text in cuneiform. The oldest known copy of Instructions of Shuruppak. Found in southern Iraq, at the site of an small Sumerian city. Stored in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad. Stolen during the Second Iraq War by looters. 6. The Rosetta Stone 7. Found in August, 1799 by Bouchard, near Rosetta, on the western mouth of the Nile River. Black basalt Deciphered by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822 Greek, Demotic, and Heiroglyphics A gift to Ptolemy V, the Greek ruler of Egypt in the 2 ndcentury BCE, for favors he had given to Egyptian priests. 8. 9. 10. Papyrus 11. Papyrus A material prepared in ancient Egypt from the pithy stem of a water plant, used in sheets throughout the ancient Mediterranean world for writing or painting on and also for making rope, sandals, and Boats. 12. Homer 13. Herodotus 14. Thucydides 15. parchment 16. parchment = animal skin 17. 1041 CE Movable Clay Type 18. Geoffrey Chaucer 1342-1400 19. THE PRINTING PRESS 20. Johannes Gutenberg 1400-1468 CE c. 1455, produced 200 copies of the Gutenberg Bible 21. Johannes Gutenberg a revolution in authority 22. putting pen to paper 23. 24. The Battler Ernest Hemingway 25. 26. Naguib Mahfouz 27. 28. Wild Sheep Chase Haruki Murakami 29. 30. Dharma Billy Collins 31. 32. The Brothers Rico Georges Simenon 33. 34. Whose War John Edgar Wideman 35. 36. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold Gay Talese 37.

THE

TYMPANIC

PAGE

38.

The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

Donald Barthelme, Rebecca

39. The Typewriter William Faulkners Portable Typewriter 40.

How do you write?

Longhand at first. Then I use the typewriter.

You never write directly onto the computer?

Oh no, I couldnt do that. I want to be forced to work

slowly because I dont want to get too much on

paper... I take a long time... I type and retype.

41. Jack Kerouac Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. 42. Jack Kerouac Write excitedly, swiftly, with writing- or-typing-cramps, in accordance with the laws of orgasm. 43. Jack Kerouac ON THE ROAD :1 SINGLE TYPEWRITTEN PARAGRAPH, 120 FEET LONG 44. 45. T.C. Boyle 46. 47. Hunter S. Thompson 48. What else is writing? 49. communication 50.

One (problem) which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication. I mean communication between two people. The fact that we are I dont know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. I would almost scream because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness. That is a theme I have taken I dont know how many times.

Georges Simenon 51. When & how does writing happen? 52.

Who knows sometimes where stories come from? They are perhaps more attached to the authors emotional life and come more out of inspiration than slogging. You shouldnt write without inspirationat least not very often... A novel is a job. Story writers working on a novel are typically in pain through the entire thing. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Lorrie Moore INSPIRATION 53.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Ernest Hemingway LOVE 54.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

Umberto Eco YOUTH 55.

You end up with a keen sense of what you still have as a writer, and also of what you dont have any longer. As you grow older, theres no reason why you cant be wiser as a novelist than you ever were before. You should know more about human nature every year of your life. Do you write about it quite as well or as brilliantly as you once did? No, not quite.

Norman Mailer EXPERIENCE 56.

There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner OBSTINACY 57.

Theres a lot of waiting around until something happens... For me its a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought occasional poetry meant that you wrote only occasionally. So theres a lot of waiting, and theres a kind of vigilance involved.

Billy Collins WAITING 58.

Everything is fine

the first bits of sun are on

the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 59.

people in cars are on their way to work,

and I will never have to write again.

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 60.

Just looking around

will suffice from here on in.

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 61.

Who said I had to always play

the secretary of the interior?

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 62.

And I am getting good at being blank,

staring at all the zeroes in the air.

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 63.

It must have been all the time spent

in the kayak this summer

that brought this out,

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 64.

the yellow one that went

nicely with the pale blue life jacket

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 65.

the sudden, tippy

buoyancy of the launch,

then the exertion, striking

into the wind against the short waves,

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 66.

but the best was drifting back,

the paddle resting athwart the craft,

and me mindless in the middle of time.

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 67.

Not even that dark cormorant

perched on the NO WAKE sign,

his narrow head raised

as if he were looking over something,

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 68.

not even that inquisitive little fellow

could bring me to write another word.

Billy Collins Returning the Pencil to Its Tray 69. Writing is entwined with society. 70.

To me, its a novel that pulls you inside the central nervous system of the characters . . . and makes you feel in your bones their motivations as affected by the society of which they are a part. It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.

Tom Wolfe A SOCIAL SETTING 71.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan EARLY WARNING 72. by Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 73.

The Chinese language has a lot of political jargon. You can talk at length without saying much, because these pieces of jargon become like formulas for public speech. And those expressions become a part of peoples consciousness. Very often people dont question the meaning of what theyre saying

English has more flexibility. Its a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural. The Chinese language is less natural. Written Chinese is not supposed to represent natural speech, and there are many different spoken dialects that correspond to the single written language. The written word will be the same in all dialects, but in speech it is a hundred different words.

Ha Jin WHY ENGLISH? Author of WAITING and several other books 74. WHAT MAKES GOOD WRITING? 75. Strunk & White The Elements of Style 76. 1. Place yourself in the background 77. 2. Write in a way that comes naturally 78. 3. Work from a suitable design 79. 4. Write with nouns and verbs 80. 5. Revise and rewrite 81. 6. Do not overwrite 82. 7. Do not overstate 83. 8. Avoid the use of qualifiers 84. 9. Do not affect a breezy manner 85. 10. Use orthodox spelling 86. 11. Do not explain too much 87. 12. Do not construct awkward adverbs 88. 13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking 89. 14. Avoid fancy words 90. 15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good 91. 16. Be clear 92. 17. Do not inject opinion 93. 18. Use figures of speech sparingly 94. 19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity 95. 20. Avoid foreign languages 96. 21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat 97. E.B. WHITE 1899-1985 98.