How to learn to write: famous authors reveal their secrets

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Writing a text is very difficult. You are sitting in front of a blank page. You are trying to create something out of nothing. Your only tool is language. To help you meet this daunting task, the New York Public Library has asked prominent authors for decades about the secrets of their work.

They all faced this problem and were able to cope with it, finding themselves on the other side of the completed book. If you want to learn how to write, be prepared to take notes. After all, now we can find out what the authors told the interviewers from the New York Public Library.

Those who have a hard time understanding English by ear can use the translated excerpts from each video. They concentrate the main thoughts and advice of the writers. And for those who understand fluent English, we advise you to include videos - they are very, very interesting.

Zadie Smith on writing and faith

English writer Zadie Smith became famous for her novel "White Teeth". Talking about her work, she says that creating every book she wrote, and indeed any novel written by anyone, is a very difficult process. You do not say: "I think so, and I will write about this." The nature of the written sentences, the accents that you place, and what remains between the lines - all this constantly expresses your beliefs, your faith and your attitude.

You talk about what you think is important and how these things are changing. And they are really volatile. The same applies to the very form of the novel.

When I wrote, I always tried to penetrate the minds of people, to extract every detail from there. When I matured, when I began to communicate more with other people, I realized that I did not know and did not understand them at all. Even my own husband is an unknown person to me. And this is one of the fundamental knowledge that you need to come to: you do not know, do not understand other people. This is what is worth reflecting in what you write: the belief that absolute knowledge is impossible.

Zadie Smith

Etgar Keret on the form

Israeli writer Etgar Keret spoke about his attitude to the form of writing. The author of the novel “When the Buses Died” notes: not that the form of what was written was absolutely unimportant. But it seems that the universities are trying to accustom us to the idea that form is sacred.

It's like people only write to put a couple of the best passages away and say, "Someday I'll use this sentence." But don't write a story about a Chinese dwarf just because you once came up with a cool sentence to start with. After all, you will never meet a Chinese dwarf in your life.

Write your story. When you start, find the right offer. If you don’t find it, use a cliché. Who knows, maybe it will work!

Etgar Keret

Jeff Dyer on the impact of predecessors

Geoff Dyer advises to resist pressure from predecessors.

The fact that some material has already been written before you should free the writer from having to process the facts. For example, so much has been written about David Herbert Lawrence, there are great biographies of this man. For me, this meant only one thing: I did not need to independently search and describe facts from his life. I just took and wrote my own book about Lawrence - and it obviously wasn't the first of its kind. So I used the existing information to move on.

Jeff Dyer

Jasmine Ward on honesty

American writer Jesmyn Ward spoke about honesty.

When I was writing my first story, I experienced so many tragedies in real life that I no longer wanted to face them in my work. However, I really didn’t want to lie. Then I started writing the novel "Save the Bones" and realized that I still hadn't told my story to the end. And so I wanted to tell more truth.

Jasmine Ward

Apparently, therefore, none of the writer's works was as frank as the memoirs Men We Reaped, which have not yet been translated into Russian.

Pico Iyer on secrets

Pico Iyer, travel writer, intrigues the reader.

I said No. Let this book remain something between fiction and reality. Let the reader not know which category to categorize it until he reads it. Let the reader worry, balance on the edge, not understanding where the book is drawing him.

Pico Iyer

Timothy Donnelly on word collage

Literary writer Timothy Donnelly believes that the use of collage techniques and a certain amount of frivolity allows him to collect and use what has already been created by great minds, so that the resulting text does not look too complicated, strange or pretentious. By uniting in this way the massifs of knowledge, Timothy Donnelly gropes for new landmarks and directions.

Toni Morrison on not knowing anything

Toni Morrison talks about ignorance to his students.

When I start a course on writing, I say, “I know what you've heard throughout your life: 'Write what you know.' Well, I'm here to tell you: you don't know anything at all. Therefore, do not write about what you know. Come up with something. Write about a young Mexican girl who works in a restaurant and does not speak English. Or about the famous Parisian courtesan, from whom luck turned away. Don't write about your grandmother or your grandfather. Go somewhere else.

Cheryl Strayed on How to Make It Work for You

Cheryl Strayed argues that the secret is to gain strength instead of weakness. Perseverance, faith, courage. And you also need to completely surrender to work.

Writing is difficult for each of us. But coal mining is much more difficult. Do you think miners stand all day and complain about how difficult it is for them to work? Of course not. They just dig.

Cheryl Strayed