I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything.
He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life.
He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let’s look at a few examples.”
He drew an empty grid on the board, like this:
now, if you were teaching creative
writing, he asked, what would you
tell them?
I’d tell them to have an unhappy love
affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth
and to drink cheap wine,
to keep switching the head of their
bed from wall to wall
and then I’d tell them to have
another unhappy love affair
and never to use a silk typewriter
ribbon,
avoid family picnics
or being photographed in a rose
garden;
read Hemingway only once,
skip Faulkner
ignore Gogol
stare at photos of Gertrude Stein
and read Sherwood Anderson in bed
while eating Ritz crackers,
realize that people who keep
talking about sexual liberation
are more frightened than you are.
listen to E. Power Biggs work the
organ on your radio while you’re
rolling Bull Durham in the dark
in a strange town
with one day left on the rent
after having given up
friends, relatives and jobs.
never consider yourself superior and /
or fair
and never try to be.
have another unhappy love affair.
watch a fly on a summer curtain.
never try to succeed.
don’t shoot pool.
be righteously angry when you
find your car has a flat tire.
take vitamins but don’t lift weights or jog.
then after all this
reverse the procedure.
have a good love affair.
and the thing
you might learn
is that nobody knows anything–
not the State, nor the mice
the garden hose or the North Star.
and if you ever catch me
teaching a creative writing class
and you read this back to me
I’ll give you a straight A
right up the pickle
barrel.
HOW TO BE A BAD WRITER (in Ten Easy Lessons) by Langston Hughes
1. Use all the cliches possible, such as “He had a gleam in his eye,” or “Her teeth were white as pearls.”
2. If you are a Negro, try very hard to write with an eye dead on the white market–use modern stereotypes of older stereotypes–big burly Negroes, criminals, low-lifers and prostitutes.
3. Put in a lot of profanity and as many pages as possible of near pornography and you will be so modern you pre-date Pompei in your lonely crusade toward the best seller lists. By all means, be misunderstood, unappreciated and ahead of your time in print and out, then you can be felt sorry for.
4. Never Characterize Characters. Just name them and then let them go for themselves. Let all of them talk the same way. If the reader hasn’t imagination enough to make something out of cardboard cut-outs, shame on him!
5. Write about China, Greece, Tibet, or the Argentine pampas–anyplace you’ve never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your hometown, or your home folks, or yourself.
6. Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it.
7. If a playwright, put into your script a lot of hand-waving and spirituals, preferably the ones everybody has heard a thousand times from Marion Anderson to the Golden Gates.
8. If a poet, rhyme June with moon as often and in as many ways as possible. Also, use thee’s and thou’s and ’tis and o’er, and invert your sentences all the time. Never say “The sun rose, bright and shining.” But, rather, “Bright and shining rose the sun.”
9. Pay no attention really to spelling or grammar or the neatness of the manuscript. And in writing letters, never sign your name so anyone can read it. A rapid scrawl will better indicate how important and how busy you are.
10. Drink as much liquor as possible and always write under the influence of alcohol. When you can’t afford alcohol yourself, or even if you can, drink on your friends, fans and the general public.
If you are white, there are many more things I can advise in order to be a bad writer, but since this piece is for colored writers, there are some things I know a Negro just will not do not even for writing’s sake, so there is no use mentioning them.
Originally published in The Harlem Quarterly (ed. John Henrik Clarke), 1950.
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.
Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.
So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
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