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Welcome to the Contests & Activities Newsletter. I am Shannon and I am your editor this week.
Today I want to talk about breaking the rules. In the February 19 issue of the Contests and Activities NL, I spoke about a book by Francine Prose titled Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Today I want to delve a little deeper into this book--Chapter Ten, to be exact: "Learning from Chekhov." |
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Let's Go Over Our Chekhov List
In Chapter Ten of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, Francine Prose talks about how, during the late 80s, she taught a college writing class two and a half hours from her home. During the long bus commute, she read stories by Anton Chekhov (233-234).
If you're not familiar with Chekhov, you can learn all you ever wanted to know about him on the Internet. For instance, Wikipedia tells us that "Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 - July 15, 1904) was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in world literature. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: 'Medicine is my lawful wife,' he once said, 'and literature is my mistress'" ("Anton Chekhov").
Prose says, "By the time Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, he had written, in addition to his plays, approximately six hundred short stories" (243).
Six hundred short stories! If Chekhov started writing at the age of fifteen, he would have had to write 20.69 short stories every year--1.72 short stories each and every month for the rest of his life--until his death at the age of forty-four to reach this incredible number.
Now that's dedication. Talk about a work ethic!
I once heard J.A. Jance say, "A writer is someone who has written today."
I think it's fair to say that Anton Chekhov was not only a writer, but a writer's writer. He can teach us volumes about not letting excuses stifle our creativity (I'm as guilty as you are) and, as Prose points out, "the writer's need for objectivity, the importance of seeing clearly, without judgment, certainly without prejudgment, the necessity that the writer be 'an unbiased observer'" (243).
That the world "swarms with male and female scum" is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect. But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth--unconditional and honest....The artist should be not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased observer (243-244). ~Anton Chekhov
What follows are quotes from Francine Prose's New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. I hope you find them as enlightening as I did.
 "... I had just come from telling a creative writing student that one reason the class may have had trouble telling his two main characters apart is that they were named Mikey and Macky. I wasn't saying that the two best friends in his story couldn't have similar names. But, given the absence of other distinguishing characteristics, it might be better--in the interests of clarity--to call one Frank, or Bill. The student seemed pleased with this simple solution to a difficult problem. I was happy to have helped. And then, as my bus pulled out of New Rochelle, I began Chekhov's 'The Two Volodyas'" (236).
"The next week, I suggested to another student that what made her story so confusing was the multiple shifts in point of view. It's only a five-page story, I said. Not Rashomon. And that afternoon I read Chekhov's 'Gusev,' which concerns a sailor who dies at sea. The story begins in the sailor's point of view, then shifts into long stretches of dialogue between him and another dying man. When Gusev dies--another 'rule' I was glad I hadn't told my students was that you can't write a story in which the narrator or point-of-view character dies--the perspective shifts to that of the sailors burying him at sea and then to that of the pilot fish who see his body fall, then to the shark who comes to investigate, until finally, as a student of mine once wrote, we feel we are seeing through the eyes of God" (237).
"Around the same time, I told my class that we should, ideally, have some notion of whom or what a story is about--in other words, as they so often say in workshops, whose story is it? To offer the reader that simple knowledge, I said, wasn't really giving much. A little clarity of focus cost the writer nothing and paid off, for the reader, a hundredfold. And it was about this same time that I first read 'In the Ravine,' in which we don't realize that the peasant girl Lipa is our heroine until almost halfway through. Moreover, the story turns on the death of a baby, just the sort of accident I advise students to stay away from because it is so difficult to write well and without sentimentality" (238-239).
"By now I had learned my lesson. I began telling my class to read Chekhov instead of listening to me.... the experience of reading Chekhov was proving not merely enlightening, but also humbling" (239).
"Still there were some things I thought I knew. A few weeks later I suggested to yet another student that he might want to think twice about having his character pick up a gun in the very last paragraph of his story and blow his head off for no reason. It wasn't that something like that couldn't happen, but it just seemed so unexpected, so melodramatic. Perhaps if he prepared the reader, ever so slightly, hinted that his character was, if not considering suicide, then at least capable of it. A few hours later I got on the bus and read the ending of 'Volodya'.... Until that moment [the moment Volodya commits suicide] we'd had no indication that Volodya was troubled by anything more than the prospect of school exams and an ordinary teenage crush on a flirtatious older woman" (240).
"For as anyone who has ever attended a writing class knows, the bottom line of the fiction workshop is motivation. We complain, we criticize, we say that we don't understand why this or that character says or does something. Like Method actors, we ask: What is the motivation? Of course, all this is based on the comforting supposition that things, in fiction as in life, are done for a reason. But here was Chekhov telling us that, as we may have noticed, people often do terrible and irrevocable things for no good reason at all" (241).
"No sooner had I assimilated this critical bit of information than I happened to read 'A Dull Story,' which convinced me that I had been not only overestimating but also oversimplifying the depth and complexities of motivation. How could I have demanded to know exactly how a certain character felt about another character when, as the narrator of 'A Dull Story" reveals on every page, our feelings for each other can be elusive, changing, contradictory, hidden in the most clever disguises even from ourselves? (241).
"Chekhov was teaching me how to teach, and yet I remained a slow learner. The mistakes and the revelations continued" (241).
"Reading another story, 'The Husband,' I remembered asking: What is the point of writing a story in which everything is rotten and all the characters are terrible and nothing much happens and nothing changes?....The 'point'--and, again, there is no conventional 'point'--is that in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor. The point is that lives go on without change, so why should fiction insist that major reverses should always, conveniently, occur?" (242).
"And finally, this revelation: In a fit of irritation, I told my class that the sufferings of the poor are more compelling and worthy of our attention than the vague discontents of the rich. So it was with some chagrin that I read 'A Woman's Kingdom,' a delicate and moving story about a rich, lovely woman--a factory owner, no less--who finds herself attracted to her foreman until a casual remark by a member of her own class awakens her to the impossibility of her situation. By the time I had finished the story, I felt that I had been challenged, not only in my more flippant statements about fiction but also in my most basic assumptions about life. The truth was what Chekhov had seen and what I--with all my fancy talk of observation--had somehow overlooked: If you cut a rich woman, she bleeds just like a poor one. Which isn't to say that Chekhov didn't know and know well: the world being what it is, the poor are cut more often and more deeply" (242-243).
"And this is what I've come to think about what I learned and what I taught and what I should have taught. Wait! I should have said to the class: Come back! I've made a mistake. Forget observation, consciousness, clear-sightedness. Forget about life. Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world" (248).
All the traditional rules of storytelling have been broken in this wonderful story of twenty pages or so [Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog"]. There is no problem, no climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written" (246). ~Vladimir Nabokov
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees--this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward (245). ~Anton Chekhov
Recommended Reading
Chekhov, Anton. Anthony Phillips (translator), A Life in Letters
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Letters-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449221/ref=sr_1_3?ie=...
Chekhov, Anton. Constance Garnett (translator), Tales of Anton Chekhov: Volumes 1-13
http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Chekhov-13-Set-Anton/dp/0061153869/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF...
Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Like-Writer-Guide-People/dp/0060777044
Works Cited
"Anton Chekhov." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 20 Feb 2009, 20:07 UTC. 22 Feb 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anton_Chekhov&oldid=272128072>.
Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
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Contests & Activities: March 04, 2009 Issue [#2903]
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