Advanced Writing IISpring 2010Tuesdays, 3:30-5:20pm

Whatiswriting?

a physical

act.

setin

stone

setin

stoneThe Abu Salbikh TabletCirca 2500 BCEA Sumerian “wisdom” text in cuneiform.

The oldest known copy of “Instructionsof 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.

TheRosettaStone

Found in August, 1799 byBouchard, near Rosetta,on the western mouth of theNile River.

Black basalt

Deciphered by Jean-FrancoisChampollion in 1822

Greek, Demotic, andHeiroglyphics

A gift to Ptolemy V, the Greek ruler of Egypt in the 2nd century BCE, for favors he had given to Egyptian priests.

Papyrus

PapyrusA material prepared inancient Egypt from thepithy stem of a waterplant, used in sheetsthroughout the ancientMediterranean worldfor writing or paintingon and also for makingrope, sandals, and Boats.

Homer

Herodotus

Thucydides

parchment

parchment

=

animal

skin

1041 CE

MovableClay Type

Geoffrey Chaucer1342-1400

THEPRINTINGPRESS

Johannes Gutenberg

1400-1468 CE

c. 1455, produced 200 copiesof the Gutenberg Bible

Johannes Gutenberg

a revolutionin authority

puttingpen

topaper

“The Battler”— Ernest Hemingway

— Naguib Mahfouz

“Wild Sheep Chase” — Haruki Murakami

“Dharma”— Billy Collins

“The Brothers Rico”— Georges Simenon

“Whose War”— John Edgar Wideman

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” — Gay Talese

THETYMPANICPAGE

“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”

The Typewriter

WilliamFaulkner’sPortableTypewriter

How do you write?

Longhand at first. Then I use the typewriter.

You never write directly onto the computer?

Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work

slowly because I don’t want to get too much on

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

Jack Kerouac“Scribbled secretnotebooks, andwild typewrittenpages, for yr ownjoy.”

Jack Kerouac“Write excitedly,swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps,in accordance…with the laws oforgasm.”

Jack KerouacON THE ROAD:

1SINGLETYPEWRITTENPARAGRAPH,120FEETLONG

— T.C. Boyle

— Hunter S. Thompson

Whatelseiswriting?

communication

GeorgesSimenon

“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 don’t 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 don’t know how many times.”

When & howdoeswritinghappen?

“Who knows sometimes where stories come from? They are perhaps more attached to the author’s emotional life and come more out of inspiration than slogging. You shouldn’t write without inspiration—at 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.”

LorrieMoore

INSPIRATION

ErnestHemingway

“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.”

LOVE

UmbertoEco

“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.”

YOUTH

NormanMailer

“You end up with a keen sense of what you still have as a writer, and also of what you don’t have any longer. As you grow older, there’s no reason why you can’t 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.”

EXPERIENCE

WilliamFaulkner

“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.”

OBSTINACY

BillyCollins

“There’s a lot of waiting around until something happens... For me it’s a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally. So there’s a lot of waiting, and there’s a kind of vigilance involved.”

WAITING

BillyCollins

Everything is fine—the first bits of sun are onthe yellow flowers behind the low wall,

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

people in cars are on their way to work,and I will never have to write again.

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

Just looking aroundwill suffice from here on in.

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

Who said I had to always playthe secretary of the interior?

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

And I am getting good at being blank,staring at all the zeroes in the air.

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

It must have been all the time spentin the kayak this summerthat brought this out,

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

the yellow one that wentnicely with the pale blue life jacket—

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

the sudden, tippybuoyancy of the launch,then the exertion, strikinginto the wind against the short waves,

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

but the best was drifting back,the paddle resting athwart the craft,and me mindless in the middle of time.

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

Not even that dark cormorantperched on the NO WAKE sign,his narrow head raisedas if he were looking over something,

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

BillyCollins

not even that inquisitive little fellowcould bring me to write another word.

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

Writingis entwinedwith society.

TomWolfe

“To me, it’s 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.”

A SOCIAL SETTING

MarshallMcLuhan

“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.”

EARLY WARNING

by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

HaJin

“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 people’s consciousness. Very often people don’t question the meaning of what they’re saying…“English has more flexibility. It’s 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.”

WHY ENGLISH?

Author of“WAITING”and severalother books

WHAT MAKESGOOD WRITING?

Strunk & WhiteThe Elements of Style

1.Place yourself in thebackground

2.Write in a way that comesnaturally

3.Work from a suitable design

4.Write with nouns and verbs

5.Revise and rewrite

6.Do not overwrite

7.Do not overstate

8.Avoid the use of qualifiers

9.Do not affect a breezymanner

10.Use orthodox spelling

11.Do not explain too much

12.Do not construct awkwardadverbs

13.Make sure the readerknows who is speaking

14.Avoid fancy words

15.Do not use dialect unlessyour ear is good

16.Be clear

17.Do not inject opinion

18.Use figures of speechsparingly

19.Do not take shortcuts atthe cost of clarity

20.Avoid foreign languages

21.Prefer the standard to theoffbeat

E.B. WHITE1899-1985