Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  But I prefer my adaptation of his advice: If you want to be original, cultivate yourself, enrich your mind, develop your empathy, your understanding of other human beings, and then, when you come to write, say what you think and feel, what you are moved to say.

  Which may bring us to five (or six) cardinal rules.

  The five cardinal rules (or six)

  (1) Work on your character. (2) Work on your handling of language so that you know what you’re doing and can do it well and be in control. (3) Know your language—its words and phrases and idioms—deeply through every kind of study of it. (4) Say what you want to say without inhibition, in the way you want to say it, regardless of what other people might think (but with sensitivity to the feelings of others). (5) Work hard (write a lot), and be patient.

  I’ll say it again, slightly differently: (1) Work closely on your technique. (2) Separately, develop your mind and character. (3) When you write, write freely, as you want to, following your own interests. (4) Work hard; be painstaking in your revision. (5) Be patient; let time go by if you have to. (6) Disregard what other people may think (but not what they may feel).

  We will revisit some of these cardinal rules in separate sections.

  Example of a writer following her own bent

  a. In a recent book of poems, Works and Days, which is a sort of springtime diary, with brief entries in prose and poetry from April into June, Bernadette Mayer includes in many of the poems non-words that are sets of mixed-up letters, inspired by Jumble, the word puzzle:

  bufial ilbafu fsiul

  walfed dewfal flawed

  This is a funny, quirky thing to do—but those Jumble words are not there because Mayer said to herself, Now, how can I be original, how can I do something different, unusual, and eye-catching? They are there because it amused and interested her to put them in—the impulse grew organically out of her own interests and preoccupations.

  This is what I mean about character and work: your nature, your character, your whole being will produce the kind of writing you do. (That is why we hate clichés so much: they don’t reflect your own, very individual person; they are borrowed ideas, in outworn language.)

  That those Jumble words were included in the diary because of Mayer’s own interests is one important point about those poems; the other is that she did not then censor her impulse—she did not say to herself, That’s silly, I’d better not do that. She trusted her own instincts—if doing this interested her, it was interesting, and those Jumble words belonged in the poems.

  And you may not even be able to articulate why you want something in a piece of writing—that is when you have to trust your instincts.

  * * *

  14. Apropos of censoring. Let us look at privacy versus publishing. Your notebook, or whatever you first write on or in, should be private, and there you should not censor at all, unless something offends even you too much to write it down. Then, when you come to the point of making your writing public, there are bad reasons to censor and good reasons to censor. A couple of good reasons to censor: You don’t want to hurt or offend other people, especially those close to you, although sometimes a writer will decide he has to publish something even if it does hurt or offend. I say “he” in this case because I am thinking of Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist, who wrote a “novel” in six fat volumes that was obviously a thinly veiled memoir and that did offend or outrage some of his family members. A second good reason to censor is—in my opinion, anyway—that we don’t need to increase the burden of obscenity and violence, including hate speech, which we already have enough of in the world.

  A bad reason to censor is, as I have probably said or implied already, the fear of what some unspecified, or specified, group of fashionable people, or one’s ambitious friends, or a conventional-minded reading public will think. Related to that, another bad reason to censor is fear of not selling your work—that’s a terrible reason.

  By “censoring,” I don’t mean just deleting offensive or hurtful material; I mean also deleting or omitting things you think someone else may think are odd or silly, like Jumble words.

  * * *

  15. Back to the idea of patience, for a moment: Be patient; don’t rush your work or try to finish before you’re ready. Be prepared to sit on it for days, weeks, months, years if necessary—keep revisiting it. Work on something else in the meantime. Return periodically to a piece that is giving you trouble. Someday you may understand what the trouble is.

  * * *

  16. Work on your expertise with the technical aspects of writing English. Know what you’re doing, and what other writers are doing—specifically.

  Read books about language, and about style: most highly recommended of all is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. This should be nearby in your room, whether you ever manage to read all the way through it or not. Dip into it regularly and read a little.

  You should have a good history of the English language; and of course you need a thesaurus and reference books on grammar, usage, rhetoric, etc. Anything and everything that makes you pay more attention to language per se, in itself, not just as a workaday “vehicle” for your ideas and your plot. And I say books, rather than online resources, for a reason: although online resources are handy, many of them are to some extent inaccurate, hastily assembled, and/or poorly written; they may be none of those things, but you simply can’t be sure. So in addition to online resources, use books, even, or especially, older editions. You could almost say that the farther back in time you go to find them, the better they will be, or at least the more carefully edited. And a lot of what is in them won’t be out of date.

  * * *

  If you can’t think of a good exercise and you’re stuck, try writing a “thesaurus” story, in which you use all possible near synonyms of a word.

  English has two predominant, parallel sets of vocabularies, Germanic and Latinate. English is incredibly rich. Here is an eloquent list of near synonyms for abusive, for example (almost all of them Latinate).

  a. “calumniating, castigating, censorious, contumelious, defamatory, derisive, disparaging, insolent, insulting, invective, libelous, maligning, obloquious, offensive, opprobrious, reproachful, reviling, rude, sarcastic, scathing, scolding, scurrilous, sharp-tongued, slanderous, traducing, upbraiding, vilifying, vituperative.”

  Which are the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic words? Rude, scathing, scolding, sharp-tongued, and maybe slandering. I’m not sure of slandering. You should know your language well enough so that you have a pretty good idea whether a word is Latinate or Germanic. Some will surprise you, but you should be right most of the time.

  I prefer to say “near synonym,” by the way, because I don’t like to use the word synonym anymore. Part of the beauty of the language is that every word is actually a little different or very different—in its meaning, its history, and its associations.

  Apropos of the two sets of vocabularies: Be aware of the history of the English language—know at least roughly how it evolved before the Norman Conquest, and how it continued to evolve afterward. Why is the Norman Conquest so important? In 1066, the Norman French conquered England and imposed upon the conquered peoples the language of Norman French, which was a Latinate language, a language descended from the particular form of Latin (what we call Vulgar Latin) spoken in France by the invading and occupying Romans. The Norman French imposed their language on the existing language, which was Old English, a West Germanic language.

  * * *

  17. Learn as much as you can, as often as possible, about the origins of the words you’re using. You will use them more accurately, and it is also interesting.

  Did you know that gregarious and egregious both have the word for “flock” or “herd” at their origins? (If you are gregarious, you like to mingle with the flock; if a thing is egregious, it stands out from the herd.)

  Sporadic and diaspora both have at their origins the idea of sowing seed. (And mushrooms reproduce from s
pores.)

  In the history of the abstract word ostracize are pottery shards.

  In the word precarious is prayer.

  In the words rodent and erode, there is the idea of gnawing.

  The buried metaphor in caprice and capricious is the behavior of a typical goat.

  At the origin of sabotage lies the French word for a wooden shoe, sabot.

  * * *

  Words that appear, or are, abstract almost always have at their origins something concrete: herd, seed, pottery shard, a rodent gnawing, a goat. Know what that concrete thing is. Your use of the abstract word will then be more accurate.

  Your use of the word should be in harmony with its origins, not in conflict. For instance, if you describe a man’s clothes as being “dilapidated,” this choice will be in conflict with the metaphorical origin of the word, which contains lapis, or “stone.” (A wall may be dilapidated, or a building, but not a pair of trousers.)

  * * *

  18. Pay attention to the sounds of the language.

  Some people hear, in their head, everything they read. Others do not. Some writers like to read aloud what they have written, to hear how it sounds. Others can hear what they’ve written without reading it out loud—though they may hear something more once they do read it out loud.

  What you write should be pleasing to hear—unless, of course, you want it to be displeasing, or awkward. In either case, you want to take fully into account how your word, phrase, or sentence sounds.

  The sounds of the more abstract, more Latinate vocabulary in English, by the way, are quite different from the sounds of the Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic, vocabulary, which teems with words that are short, abrupt, sometimes percussive (think of the difference, for instance, between impecunious and broke). We may return to the sounds of your language, but meanwhile—let’s relate the sounds of your language to your diet of reading.

  * * *

  19. Be sure to read poetry, regularly, whether you are a poet or a writer of prose. I hope, of course, that if you’re a poet, you are already reading a lot of poetry. You will not develop, as a writer, if you don’t read. You won’t write as well, if you’re a prose writer, if you don’t read poetry.

  The poet William Bronk’s definition of a poem (I can’t remember where I read it) included the words condensation and serious concerns. Of course, not all poems involve “serious concerns.” That was what he thought of as the most important characteristics of a poem. His poems were dense and compact and certainly expressed serious concerns.

  It is important for you to absorb, regularly, a poem’s concentrated attention to language, and its economy. I spoke earlier about the strangers you may come to know when sharing your armrest with them on an airplane flight. One young man I met that way who was, maybe, a lawyer—I can’t remember—and a great reader admitted sadly that he was afraid of poetry. He was afraid he wouldn’t understand it and did not like being in that position.

  If you’re afraid of poetry, or think you dislike it, as a friend of mine dislikes water, then find a way to begin reading it, maybe by starting with the most prosy poems. In fact, that is an idea for an anthology of poems—to start the book with the easiest, most prose-like poems and progress to the most obscure and difficult.

  I have another friend who said, last time I saw her, “I don’t like poetry.” We began to debate this. I was indignant. I said, “But poetry is not just one thing. There are many different kinds of poems and poets. Somewhere there must be a poet or at least a single poem that you like.” Then she remembered that—it was true—her book club had read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and she had liked it. I liked that book, too. It is a long narrative poem in sections, some of which, in their language and settings, reminded me of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, which I think is one of the superb American classics.

  We don’t see each other often enough so that we could really get into a discussion of her initial statement—“I don’t like poetry.” But later I realized that I have probably been caught saying, or thinking, “I don’t like jazz.” And that would be just as blind, general, and inaccurate. It has made me stop saying I don’t like jazz and realize that, yes, actually, I like some jazz, like Miles Davis and Sidney Bechet. Probably even quite a few others. John Coltrane.

  * * *

  20. Be curious—be curious about as much as possible. Think, generally, about how curious you are, or are not, as a person. If you are not very curious, think about why not. And try to cultivate curiosity. If you are curious, you will learn things, and the more curious you are, the more you will learn. And curiosity may lead you deeper and deeper into all sorts of subjects.

  My latest example of curiosity and the pursuit of answers is the three lines of bricks in the Roman towers in the French town of Bourges. (I should really say courses of bricks; course is the correct word for a layer of bricks; James Joyce, especially, was very particular about using the correct term for a thing—he seemed to delight in it.) For a full week, in Bourges, where I first noticed this pattern, I wondered about those bricks. I was sure they were not just decorative—there must have been something in the construction of the towers that called for them. Then, at the Cluny Museum in Paris, I found a mention of them, though maybe not yet the complete answer.

  But there are many more things to be curious about: at the Culinary Institute of America, how do they teach the students the right way to uncork a bottle of wine? When you blow on an ant, trying to move it, and it doesn’t move, why is it so good at bracing itself? Does it have strong little muscles in its little legs? Why, exactly, does power corrupt?

  And don’t underestimate the value of spending time wondering about something, like those three courses of bricks, while not immediately finding the answer by looking it up on the internet, as you stand there in the street in front of the towers. Wondering means that you try to answer the question yourself, first; you are more alert to picking up clues, trying to figure it out; and that means also that you will come up with various possible answers that may open yet other avenues of interest, so that the whole subject has time to expand and develop in your mind before you find the answer. About those bricks, I had time to wonder: Do they somehow stabilize the structure? Does it have to do with absorption of moisture? What do I know, anyway, about the relative porousness or permeability of bricks versus stone?

  After I copied out, here, the journal entry I made in the Cluny Museum, I found another I had copied out from a book in French that I had bought on the trip and was reading. It provided more of an answer, embedded in a sentence (here translated into English) about something else: “a row of three superimposed bricks which served as agrafes for Roman builders.” But what were agrafes? This is crucial, naturally, but I have only now looked it up: it means staples, fasteners, or hooks. I’m closer to understanding, but I still don’t quite get it.

  * * *

  21. Speaking of not looking things up right away: Free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day—or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people and without a device that is turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.

  Which reminds me of a class discussion that took place in a fiction workshop, once, about the most significant historical events of the twentieth century. I had given the perhaps misguided assignment of asking the students to create a timeline of important events in the twentieth century. I do habitually give impulsive assignments that don’t always turn out well. I had in mind that we should all be able to locate ourselves generally in the twentieth century, or any century, for that matter, in relation to a few important dates. I still think that’s important. If you read in the biography of a writer that his best work was done after World War II, you need to know the dates of World War II. Important events of the first half of the twentieth century might be, at the very least, World War I, the Great Depr
ession, and World War II. Here is a possible sequence, for the United States anyway: the Gilded Age; World War I; the Roaring Twenties; the Great Depression; World War II; the Korean War; the Vietnam War. And, closing the century, the development of the personal computer and the creation of the internet.

  In the class, we had a good and protracted discussion exclusively about American history, with some of the history buffs going into amazingly sophisticated detail about a number of events whose importance I was hardly aware of, like the mechanization of the cotton industry. One student remarked later that part of her fascination with what was occurring in class was that the discussion relied entirely on what information was contained in our brains—no one consulted a device.

  (Another impulsive assignment of mine was for the students to attempt, outside class, during the week, to come up with a list of all the words they could think of that began with wr. I forget where that assignment came from, probably from trying, myself, to think of those words and realizing how relatively few of them there were. The rule was that of course you could not look them up in a dictionary or online—you had to try to remember them yourself, but you could ask another person. This assignment had a rather interesting outcome, when we realized what all these words, or most of them—not the Cornish-derived wrasse, referring to a type of fish—had in common.)

  * * *

  22. I want to skip back to the idea of not having too much context, context meaning explanation, or exposition.