![]() This is a cliché, of course, but you will write more when you tell yourself that no day must pass without writing. These habits have worked for me and I want my students to use them to cultivate the practice of writing.ġ. My list isn’t in any way a presumption of expertise and is offered only as evidence of experience. I have also prepared my own list of rules for my students. Why? “It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” On the first day of my writing class this year, I handed out xeroxed sheets of rules by Ray Bradbury, not least because he offers the valuable advice that one should write a short story each week for a whole year. But I offer my own students rules all the time. Of course, rules can never be a substitute for what a writer can learn, should learn, simply by sitting down and writing. A beginner should take them daily, like a dose of much-needed vitamins. In their simplicity and directness, I do not think the above rules can be improved upon. ![]() You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. ![]() A sentence should not have more than 10 or 12 words.Įvery day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners”:ĭo not write long sentences. I followed the rules diligently for at least a year, and my book Bombay-London-New York was a product of the writing I did during that period. Like a traveler in a new place, I asked questions, took notes, and began to arrange things in a narrative. I was discovering language as if it were a new country. The rules were a wonderful antidote to my practice of using academic jargon, and they made me conscious of my own writing habits. In the weeks that followed, I began writing a regular literary column for Tehelka, and, in those pieces, I tried to work by Naipaul’s rules. A few days later I left India and the sheet traveled with me, folded in the pages of a book that I was reading. I was told that I could take the sheet if I wanted. He had fussed over their formulation, corrected them, and then faxed back the corrections. It was explained to me that Naipaul was asked by the Tehelka reporters if he could give them some basic suggestions for improving their language. Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners.” These were rules for writing. And high above someone’s computer was a sheet of paper that said “V. There was a pen-and-ink portrait of Naipaul on the wall because he was one of the trustees. Later, when we were done, I was taken around for a tour of the place. I was visiting my parents in India at that time it was winter, and I went to the Tehelka office to talk to the editors. About a decade ago, soon after I had received tenure, Tehelka asked me to come aboard as a writer. Almost writing ‘the cat sat on the mat.’ I almost began like that.”Īnd I did that too, almost. I abandoned everything and began to write like a child at school. In the beginning I had to forget everything I had written by the age of 22. The sentence I had quoted had mattered to me, yes, and so had the book, but what had really helped was Naipaul’s telling an interviewer that in an effort to write clearly he had turned himself into a beginner: “It took a lot of work to do it. Every time I start to write, I am reminded of Naipaul’s book.īut that wasn’t the whole truth, neither about Naipaul, nor about beginnings. ![]() The ambition and the anxiety of the beginner is there at the beginning of each book. It has lasted through the twenty years of my writing life. Its very first sentence established in my mind the idea of writing as an opening in time or a beginning: that sentence conveyed to me, with its movement and rhythm, a history of repeated striving, and of things coming together, at last, in the achievement of the printed word: “It is now nearly thirty years since, in a bbc room in London, on an old bbc typewriter, and on smooth, ‘non-rustle’ bbc script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book.” This first sentence-about a first sentence-created an echo in my head. This was one of the first literary autobiographies that I read. The library then purchased a copy, which was duly displayed in one of its rooms, with a statement I had written about the book: When I was promoted to the rank of professor, the library at the university where I was then employed asked me to send them the name of a book that had been useful to me in my career. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, these essays explore how Kumar, a Professor of English at Vassar College, practices being a ‘writer in the world.’ The following is from Amitava Kumar’s essay collection Lunch with a Bigot. ![]()
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