/lit/ - Literature

Some remarks that W. G. Sebald reportedly made in his last creative writing class before he died:

>You need to set things very thoroughly in time and place unless you have good reasons [not to]. Young authors are often too worried about getting things moving on the rails, and not worried enough about what’s on either side of the tracks.

>A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.

>Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather.

>It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it is not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a sequence of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.

>You sometimes need to magnify something, describe it amply in a roundabout way. And in the process you discover something.

>‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.

>Oddities are interesting.

>Characters need details that will anchor themselves in your mind.

>A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.

>Every sentence taken by itself should mean something.

>Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic’.

>It’s easy to write rhythmical prose. It carries you along. After a while it gets tedious.

>Avoid sentences that serve only to set up later sentences.

>Don’t revise too much or it turns into patchwork.

>Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

>By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.

>Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality. [What the fuck does this one mean?]