How To Write Like Tolstoy - Richard Cohen, Kartoniert (TB) | Orbisana

How to Write Like Tolstoy. CHAPTER 1 Grab, Invite, Beguile: Beginnings LEONARD: So what were we talking about? KATE: The first sentence. LEONARD: Oh yeah, Christ. THERESA REBECK, SEMINAR, 2011 Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. P. G. WODEHOUSE, OPENING OF THE LUCK OF THE BODKINS, 1925 How to begin? I m thinking of that moment when a writer stares at a sheet of blank paper (or, today, a screen) like a weightlifter assessing a massive dumbbell; the effort of setting down any mark seems beyond him. A cup of coffee is appealing ­a second cup, a quick session of emailing, a short walk, even a phone call. After all such procrastinations, a final inspiration: Focus instead on something completely different to what was planned, and likely far better. What was it Douglas Adams said? I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Gertrude Stein liked to look at cows in the intervals of her writing, and would be driven into the countryside to do so. Woody Allen takes constant showers to aid inspiration. Those grandes dames of postwar British fiction, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark, never set pen to paper until they had thought of a satisfactory opening. A novel is a long job, Murdoch explained, and if you get it wrong at the start you re going to be very unhappy later on. John Irving, on the other hand, begins each of his novels by writing the book s final sentence.Before he starts to write, George Steiner, the polymath and novelist, takes a page of top prose in the relevant language and reads it aloud, often until he knows it by heart. But it will have nothing to do with the subject. In The Plague Albert Camus has his character Joseph Grand rewrite the first sentence of his novel eternally, with only minimal variations. Beginnings are notoriously difficult. E. L. Doctorow tells of being asked by his daughter to give her an absence note for her schoolteacher. He started to write, then thought, No, that s not it, and started again. The second version didn t hit the required note either. Further drafts followed, until his young daughter was in a state of panic and there was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor. Finally his wife came in and, with a look of disbelief, dashed off the required short letter. Doctorow concluded: I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. He is hardly alone. The American wit of the interwar period, Robert Benchley, was at his typewriter at The New Yorker agonizing over how to begin. He got up, talked with some friends, and an hour later returned to his desk. He gathered his thoughts once more and typed out the single word The. Then he left for a party that was in full flow down the hall, but conscience forced him back. He sat down, focused again, and typed three more words, . . . hell with it. With that he returned to the revelers. In A. A. Milne s Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin s unnamed narrator starts his tale with the words, Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday. . . . When that time is, exactly, is not generally the issue: All that matters is that we are about to escape into a world of make-­believe. The phrase Once upon a time can be traced to as early as 1380; not until 1600 did it become a stock opening for oral narratives. It occurs in other languages too, from the familiar to the more obscure: In Estonian it s Behind seven lands and seas there lived. .

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