How to Write Like Chekhov

Writing Advice Write as if You Were Painting 143 • Use Photographs 144 • Report Conversations 144 • Tell Stories as They Were Told 146 • Juxtapose the Past and the Present 148 • Juxtapose the Unfamiliar with the Familiar 150 • Decide What Names to Use 151 • Provide Summaries of Chapters 152

Last Things Where to Publish 152 • Plan Your Celebration 153 • Plan Your Next Trip 153

Acknowledgments 155

Who's Who in Chekhov's Correspondence 157 Afterword by Piero Brunello 169 For Further Reading 183 Notes 187

PREFACE

his book began life as two separate Italian vol-

umes, No Plot, No Ending and Good Shoes and a Notebook} This English-language edition combines this material between one set of covers, which makes sense for two reasons: it gives the reader direct access to Anton Chekhov's nuggets of writing wisdom in the form of advice to writers tucked in his correspondence, and it provides examples of this advice in practice, in the form of excerpts from his non- fiction travel memoir The Island of Sakhalin}

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The notes that periodically amplify the primary text are by Piero Brunello [PB.] and myself [L.L.], and in part 2, "Good Shoes and a Notebook," a dozen or so are by Chekhov himself [A.C.]; those notes attributed to him here originally appeared as notes to The Island of Sakhalin.

—Lena Lencek

INTRODUCTION BY PIERO BRUNELLO

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his volume presents Anton Chekhov's advice on how to write. Its purpose is to transmit Chekhov's guidelines on becoming a good writer, and it is presented with the hope that these guidelines will be useful, in various ways, to novices and to experienced professional writers alike. Chekhov's detailed suggestions draw heavily on his own experience, both as a writer of short stories, plays, novellas, and nonfiction and as a discerning reader of literary texts. He knew the burden of solitude that comes with writing, the compulsive need to write, and the dispiriting sting of an indifferent reception.

How to Write Like Chekhov began as a collection of advice that over a period of time I excerpted from Chekhov's work to help with my own writing. One day it occurred to me that what this great writer had to say on the subject could be useful to others as well. I remembered, for instance, that Raymond Carver—who in addition to writing short stories and poems taught creative writing for many years—used to credit Chekhov with having had an "enormous influence" on his own work and that he too had echoed Chekhov's lessons: to

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stick to "plain but precise language"; to reject "words weighed down with uncontrolled emotion"; to deliver "serious testimony about our lives"; and to remember that critics "can alleviate the sense of solitude" experienced by those who write.³ Thus was born the idea for a book, and one organized around several topics.

Part i, "No Plot, No Ending," is almost exclusively composed of material taken from Chekhov's extensive correspondence between the years i886 and i902, much of it with editors, writers, family, and friends bitten by the writing bug. Famous for being generous with his time and his energy, Chekhov was besieged with manuscripts and requests for feedback. Excerpts from his replies are included here and organized into rubrics cued by the sorts of questions that plague all writers: general questions about the motives for writing, audience, topics, approach, timing, and scope; and specific topics such as truth, descriptions, characters, emotions, what to avoid, and how to deal with one's fellow writers.

After the theory of part i, part 2, "Good Shoes and a Notebook," takes a different approach: concrete demonstrations taken largely from Chekhov's nonfiction travel memoir The Island of Sakhalin. Initially conceived as his doctoral dissertation in medicine, though never put to that use, this extraordinary exposй by Chekhov of the czarist penal system was undertaken in the scientific spirit of Claude Bernard, the nineteenth-century physiologist who championed philosophical skepticism as the fundamental tool of the medical researcher. "Experimenters must doubt," Barnard wrote in his groundbreaking An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, "avoid fixed ideas, and always keep their freedom of mind."⁴ Writers must do the same.

In The Island of Sakhalin, Chekhov makes few explicit statements on methodology; rather, he limits himself to the rare aside questioning the validity, for instance, of statistics, or official reports. By and large, he trusts what he is told. He interpolates into his travel notes, character sketches, and descriptions of the landscape concrete information, including demographic data, meteorological tables, and medical and crime statistics. Chekhov also says next to nothing about writing. Although, as his narrative unfolds, one senses Chekhov's finely tuned mind sifting, weighing, and measuring hearsay against firsthand knowledge, he keeps silent about matters touching on his art. This silence presented a challenge to me, as I specifically wished to mine explicit lessons from the text. In order to do this, I have sought, first, to understand what Chekhov was doing in the course of his journey, and second, to present the episodes and anecdotes he recounts as advice, both theoretical and practical.

I have decided to arrange this advice in a way that illustrates every stage involved in creating a nonfiction manuscript. I begin with the conception of the idea and the initial tasks of reading up on the topic, framing the questions, and entertaining doubts. Next, I pass on to the fieldwork, with its research strategies and maneuvers for collecting data. Finally, I turn to the production of the manuscript itself: the organization of the notes and documents, the actual process of writing, and the delivery of the completed text into the world. I have divided this process into three sections: "The Project," "The Report," and "The Actual Writing." Under each rubric, I identify a number of critical steps with a title and supply a brief explanation of the principle or "lesson" that is exemplified in the passage from Chekhov's text. The idea here is to give readers a concrete example of how the advice was implemented, on the assumption that having a model before one's eyes is the best route to mastering techniques.

The Sakhalin material is especially addressed to writers who, like Chekhov, are interested in discovering, exploring, and understanding the unknown. The modus operandi of his voyage of discovery is useful not only to writers who make long journeys and wish to write about them but also to those who want to understand life closer to home. Chekhov's prose is a model for writers who care less for plot than for "what transpires in the space of a breath, in the meeting of two glances, in the moment of suspense when everything is both obvious and arcane." Those are the words of the Italian journalist Francesca Sanvitale, speaking with reference to the work of Katherine Mansfield, a writer who shared Chekhov's view of "the external certainty of the world, the ferment in the continual flux of life," and believed that "the beauty of life is to be found in its kaleidoscopic appearance."⁵ Mansfield, like many modern writers, admired Chekhov's peculiarly detached curiosity: "The artist watches life closely," she wrote in a letter in 1921. "He says softly, 'So this is life, huh?' And he sits down to try to express it."⁶