Writing Tips for the Amateur Writer

50 Tips on How to Write Good

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/50-tips-on-how-to-write-good/

by Mark Nichol

The contents of this post are an alphabetical arrangement of two lists that have been circulating among writers and editors for many years. In case you have missed out all this time, I’m sharing here the wit and wisdom of the lateNew York Times language maven William Safire and advertising executive and copywriter Frank LaPosta Visco.

1. A writer must not shift your point of view.
2. Always pick on the correct idiom.
3. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
4. Always be sure to finish what
5. Avoid alliteration. Always.
6. Avoid archaeic spellings.
7. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
8. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
9. Be more or less specific.
10. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
11. Contractions aren’t necessary.
12. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
13. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
14. Don’t never use no double negatives.
15. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
16. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
17. Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
18. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
19. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
20. Employ the vernacular.
21. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
22. Eschew obfuscation.
23. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
24. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
25. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
26. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
27. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
28. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
29. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
30. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
31. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
32. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
33. Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
34. No sentence fragments.
35. One should never generalize.
36. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
37. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
38. Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
39. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.
40. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
41. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
42. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
43. Profanity sucks.
44. Subject and verb always has to agree.
45. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
46. The adverb always follows the verb.
47. The passive voice is to be avoided.
48. Understatement is always best.
49. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
50. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
51. Who needs rhetorical questions?
52. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

Oh, and let me add one tip: If your article consists of a list and the title refers to the number of items in the list, count the number of items in the list carefully.

  

* * * * * * * * * * *

How to Write Good http://www.workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm

Want to learn how to really write good? Want to learn "The Ten Magic Phrases of Journalism" and the "Tricks Of The Trade"? Then this insightful satirical essay from the early 1970's is for you. by Michael O'Donoghue "If I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night." - Irving Wallace  "Financial success is not the only reward of good writing. It brings to the writer rich inner satisfaction as well."- Eliot Foster, Director of Admissions Famous Writers School Introduction  A long time ago, when I was just starting out, I had the good fortune to meet the great Willa Cather. With all the audacity of youth, I asked her what advice she would give the would-be-writer and she replied: "My advice to the would-be-writer is that he start slowly, writing short undemanding things, things such as telegrams, flip-books, crank letters, signature scarves, spot quizzes, capsule summaries, fortune cookies and errata. Then, when he feels he's ready, move up to the more challenging items such as mandates, objective correlatives, passion plays, pointless diatribes, minor classics, manifestos, mezzotints, oxymora, exposes, broadsides, and papal bulls. "And above all, never forget that the pen is mightier than the plow-share. By this I mean that writing, all in all, is a hell of a lot more fun than farming. For one thing, writers seldom, if ever, have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and shovel manure. As far as I'm concerned, that gives them the edge right there." She went on to tell me many things, both wonderful and wise, probing the secrets of her craft, showing how to weave a net of words and capture the fleeting stuff of life. Unfortunately, I've forgotten every bit of it. I do recall, however, her answer when I asked "If you could only give me one rule to follow, what would it be?" She paused, looked down for a moment and finally said, "Never wear brown shoes with a blue suit." There's very little I could add to that except to say "Go to it and good luck!" Lesson 1 - The Grabber The "grabber" is the initial sentence of a novel or short story designed to jolt the reader out of his complacency and arouse his curiosity, forcing him to press onward. For example: "It's no good, Alex," she rejoined, "Even if I did love you, my father would never let me marry an alligator." The reader is immediately bombarded with questions, questions such as "Why won't her father let her marry an alligator?" "How come she doesn't love him?" and "Can she learn to love him in time?" The reader's interest has been "grabbed"! Just so there'll be no misunderstanding about grabbers, I've listed a few more below: "I'm afraid you're too late," sneered Zoltan. "The fireplace has already flown south for the winter!" Sylvia lay sick among the silverware... Chinese vegetables mean more to me than you do, my dear," Charles remarked to his wife, adding injury to insult by lodging a grapefruit knife in her neck. "I have in my hands," Professor Willobee exclaimed, clutching a sheaf of papers in his trembling fingers and pacing in circles about the carpet while I stood at the window, barely able to make out the Capitol dome through the thick, churning for that rolled in off the Potomac, wondering to myself what matter could possibly be so urgent as to bring the distinguished historian bursting into my State Department office at the unseemly hour, "definitive proof that Abraham Lincoln was a homo!" These are just a handful of the possible grabbers. Needless to say, there are thousands of others, but if you fail to think of them, feel free to use any or all of these. Lesson 2 - The Ending All too often, the budding author finds that his tale has run its course and yet he sees no way to satisfactorily end it, or, in literary parlance, "wrap it up." Observe how easily I resolve this problem: Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck. -the end- If the story happens to be set in England, use the same ending, slightly modified: Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry. -the end- If set in France: Soudainement, tout le monde etait écrasé par un camion. -finis- You'll be surprised at how many different settings and situations this ending applies to. For instance, if you were writing a story about ants, it would end "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede." In fact, this is the only ending you ever need use.* *Warning - if you are writing a story about trucks, do not have the trucks run over by a truck. Have the trucks run over by a mammoth truck. Lesson 3 - Choosing A Title A friend of mine recently had a bunch of articles rejected by the Reader's Digest and, unable to understand why, he turned to me for advice. I spotted the problem at a glance. His titles were all wrong. By calling his pieces such things as "Unwed Mothers - A Head Start on Life," "Cancer - The Incurable Disease," "A Leading Psychologist Explains Why There Should Be More Violence on Television," "Dognappers I Have Known and Loved," "My Baby Was Born Dead and I Couldn't Care Less" and "Pleasantville - Last of the Wide-Open Towns," he had seriously misjudged his market. To steer him straight, I drew up this list of all-purpose surefire titles: ________ at the Crossroads The Case for ________ The Role of ________ Coping with Changing ________ A Realistic Look at ________ The ________ Experience Bridging the ________ Gap A ________ for All Seasons Simply fill in the blanks with the topic of your choice and, if that doesn't work you can always resort to the one title that never fails: "South America, the Sleeping Giant on our Doorstep" Lesson 4 - Exposition Perhaps the most difficult technique for the fledgling writer to master is proper treatment of exposition. Yet watch the sly, subtle way I "set the scene" of my smash play, The Last to Know, with a minimum of words and effort. (The curtain opens on a tastefully appointed dining room, the table ringed by men in tuxedos and women in costly gowns. There is a knock at the door.) LORD OVERBROOKE: Oh, come in, Lydia. Allow me to introduce my dinner guests to you. This is Cheryl Heatherton, the madcap soybean heiress whose zany antics actually mask a heart broken by her inability to meaningfully communicate with her father, E. J. Heatherton, seated to her left, who is too caught up in the heady world of high finance to sit down and have a quiet chat with his own daughter, unwanted to begin with, disposing of his paternal obligations by giving her everything, everything but love, that is. Next to them sits Geoffrey Drake, a seemingly successful merchant banker trapped in an unfortunate marriage with a woman half his age, who wistfully looks back upon his days as the raffish Group Captain of an R.A.F. bomber squadron that flew eighty-one missions over Berlin, his tortured psyche refusing to admit, despite frequent nightmares in which, dripping with sweat, he wakes screaming, "Pull it up! Pull it up, I say! I can't hold her any longer! We're losing altitude! We're going down! Jerry at three o'clock Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggh!", that his cowardice and his cowardice alone was responsible for the loss of his crew and "Digger," the little Manchester terrier who was their mascot. The empty chair to his right was vacated just five minutes ago by Geoffrey's stunning wife, twenty-three- year-old, golden-tressed Edwina Drake, who, claiming a severe migraine, begged to be excused that she might return home and rest, whereas, in reality, she is, at this moment, speeding to the arms of another man, convinced that if she can steal a little happiness now, it doesn't matter who she hurts later on. The elderly servant preparing the Caviar en Socle is Andrew who's been with my family for over forty years although he hasn't received a salary for the last two, even going on so far as to loan me his life's savings to cover my spiraling gambling debts but it's only a matter of time before I am exposed as a penniless fraud and high society turns its back on me. The dark woman opposite me is Yvonne de Zenobia, the fading Mexican film star, who speaks of her last movie as though it was shot only yesterday, unwilling to face the fact that she hasn't been before the cameras in nearly fifteen years; unwilling to confess that her life has been little more than a tarnished dream. As for her companion, Desmond Trelawney, he is an unmitigated scoundrel about whom the less said, the better. And, of course, you know your father, the ruthless war profiteer, and your hopelessly alcoholic mother, who never quite escaped her checkered past, realizing, all too late, that despite her jewels and limousines, she was still just a taxi-dancer who belonged to any man for a drink and a few cigarettes. Please take a seat. We were just talking about you. This example demonstrates everything you'll ever need to know about exposition. Study it carefully. Lesson 5 - Finding the Raw Material As any professional writer will tell you, the richest source of material is one's relatives, one's neighbors and, more often than not, total strangers. A day doesn't go by without at least one person, upon learning that I'm a professional writer, offering me some terrific idea for a story. And I'm sure it will come as no shock when I say that most of the ideas are pretty damn good! Only last week, a pipe-fitter of my acquaintance came up with a surprise ending guaranteed to unnerve the most jaded reader. What you do is tell this really weird story that keeps on getting weirder and weirder until, just when the reader is muttering, "How in the heck is he going to get himself out of this one? He's really painted himself into a corner!" you spring the "mindblower": "But then he woke up. It had all been a dream!" (which I, professional writer that I am, honed down to: "But then the alarm clock rang. It had all been a dream!"). And this came from a common, run-of-the-mill pipe-fitter! For free! Cabdrivers, another great wealth of material, will often remark, "Boy, lemme tell ya! Some of the characters I get in this cab would fill a book! Real kooks, ya know what I mean?" And then, without my having to coax even the slightest, they tell me about them, and they would fill a book. Perhaps two or three books. In addition, if you're at all interested in social science, cabdrivers are able to provide countless examples of the failures of the welfare state. To illustrate just how valid these unsolicited suggestions can be, I shall print a few lines from a newly completed play inspired by my aunt, who had the idea as far back as when she was attending grade school. It's called "If an Old House Could Talk, What Tales It Would Tell". The Floor: Do you remember the time the middle-aged lady who always wore the stilletto heels tripped over an extension cord while running to answer the phone and spilled the Ovaltine all over me and they spent the next 20 minutes mopping it up? The Wall: No. Of course, I can't print too much here because I don't want to spoil the ending (although I will give you a "hint": it involves a truck...). I just wanted to show you how much the world would have missed had I rejected my aunt's suggestion out of hand simply because she is not a professional writer like myself. Lesson 6 - Quoting Other Authors If placed in a situation where you must quote another author, always write "[sic]" after any word that may be misspelled or looks the least bit questionable in any way. If there are no misspellings or curious words, toss in a few "[sic]"s just to break up the flow. By doing this, you will appear to be knowledgeable and "on your toes," while the one quoted will seem suspect and vaguely discredited. Two examples will suffice: "O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowiest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship [sic], lend a myth to God" - Hart Crane "Beauty is but a flowre [sic], Which wrinckles [sic] will devoure [sic] Brightnesse [sic] falls from the ayre [sic] Queenes [sic] have died yong [sic] and faire [sic] Dust hath closde [sic] Helens [sic] eye [sic] I am sick [sic], I must dye [sic]: Lord, have mercy on us." - Thomas Nashe Note how only one small "[sic]" makes Crane's entire stanza trivial and worthless, which, in his case, takes less doing that Nashe, on the other hand, has been rendered virtually unreadable. Anyone having to choose between you and Nashe would pick you every time! And, when it's all said and done, isn't that the name of the game? Lesson 7 - Making The Reader Feel Inadequate Without question, the surest way to make a reader feel inadequate is through casual erudition, and there is no better way to achieve casual erudition than by putting the punchline of an anecdote in a little foreign language. Here's a sample: One crisp October morning, while taking my usual stroll down the Kurfurstenstrasse, I spied my old friend Casimir Malevitch, the renowned Suprematist painter, sitting on a bench.  Noting that he had a banana in his ear, I said to him, "Excuse me, Casimir, but I believe you have a banana in your ear." "What?" he asked. Moving closer and speaking quite distinctly, I repeated my previous observation, saying, "I said 'You have a banana in your ear!' " "What's that you say?" came the reply. By now I was a trifle piqued at this awkward situation and, seeking to make myself plain, once and for all, I fairly screamed, "I SAID THAT YOU HAVE A BANANA IN YOUR EAR, YOU DOLT!!!" Imagine my chagrin when Casimir looked at me blankly and quipped, "Meh soon kahi sakta - meree kaan meh kayla heh!" Oh, what a laugh we had over that one. With one stroke, the reader has been made to feel not only that his education was second-rate, but that you are getting far more out of life than he. This is precisely why this device is best used in memoirs, whose sole purpose is to make the reader feel that you have lived life to the fullest, while his existence, in comparison, has been meaningless and shabby.... Lesson 8 - Covering The News Have you ever wondered how reporters are able to turn out a dozen or so news articles day after day, year after year, and still keep their copy so fresh, so vital, so alive? It's because they know The Ten Magic Phrases of Journalism, key constructions with which one can express every known human emotion! As one might suppose, The Phrases, discovered only after centuries of trial and error, are a closely guarded secret, available to no one but accredited members of the press. However, at the risk of being cashiered from the Newspaper Guild, I am now going to reveal them to you: The Ten Magic Phrases of Journalism "violence flared" "limped into port" "according to informed sources" "wholesale destruction" "no immediate comment" "student unrest" "riot-torn" "flatly denied" "gutted by fire" "roving bands of Negro youths" Let's try putting The Phrases to work in a sample news story: NEWARK, NJ, Aug. 22 (UPI) - Violence flared yesterday when roving bands of Negro youths broke windows and looted shops in riot-torn Newark. Mayor Kenneth Gibson had no immediate comment but, according to informed sources, he flatly denied saying that student unrest was behind the wholesale destruction that resulted in scores of buildings being gutted by fire, and added, "If this city were a Liberian freighter,* we just may have limped into port." *Whenever needed, "Norwegian Tanker" can always be substituted for "Liberian freighter." Consider them interchangeable. Proof positive that The Ten Magic Phrases of Journalism can express every known human emotion and then some! Lesson 9 - Tricks Of The Trade Just as homemakers have their hints (e.g. a ball of cotton, dipped in vanilla extract and placed in the refrigerator, will absorb food odors), writers have their own bag of tricks, a bag of tricks, I might hasten to point out, you won't learn at any Bread Loaf Conference. Most writers, ivory tower idealists that they are, prefer to play up the mystique of their "art" (visitations from the Muse, l'ecriture automatique, talking in tongues, et cetera, et cetera), and sweep the hard-nosed practicalities under the rug. Keeping in mind, however, that a good workman doesn't curse his tools, I am now going to make public these long suppressed tricks of the trade. Suppose you've written a dreadful chapter (we'll dub it Chapter Six for our purposes here), utterly without merit, tedious and boring beyond belief, and you just can't find the energy to re-write it. Since it's obvious that the reader, once he realizes how dull and shoddy Chapter Six really is, will refuse to read any further, you must provide some strong ulterior motive for completing the chapter. I've always found lust effective: Artfully concealed within the next chapter is the astounding secret of an ancient Bhutanese love cult that will increase your sexual satisfaction by at least 60% and possibly more-- (Print Chapter Six.) Pretty wild, huh? Bet you can hardly wait to try it! And don't show your appreciation by reading Chapter Seven!* *This ensures that the reader reads Chapter Six not once but several times. Possibly, he may even read Chapter Seven. Fear also works: Dear Reader, This message is printed on Chinese poison paper which is made from deadly herbs that are instantly absorbed by the fingertips so it won't do any good to wash your hands because you will die a horrible and lingering death in about an hour unless you take the special antidote which is revealed in Chapter Six and you'll be saved. Sincerely, (Your name) Or even: Dear Reader, You are obviously one of those rare people who are immune to Chinese paper so this message is printed on Bavarian poison paper which is about a thousand times more powerful and even if you're wearing gloves you're dead for sure unless you read Chapter Six very carefully and find the special antidote. Sincerely, (Your name) Appealing to vanity, greed, sloth and whatever, you can keep this up, chapter by chapter, until they finish the book. In fact, the number of appeals is limited only by human frailty itself... LESSON 10 - MORE WRITING HINTS There are many more writing hints I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck. -the end- © Copyright by Michael O'Donoghue. All Rights Reserved. Michael O'Donoghue was a writer and editor -- as well as an author, playwright, radio writer, filmmaker, satirist, scribe, essayist and commentator. He was an editor and writer at the original National Lampoon, and a writer on Saturday Night Live in its early years. We feel compelled to tell you that you can get books, CDs and radio shows by Michael O'Donoghue (who had nothing to do with this website).

Repost: Never End a Story With a Dream?

 

 

 

 

Chasing the White Rabbit
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/08/chasing-white-rabbit/

 

by Francine Prose

An illustration by John Tenniel from

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

 

My seventh-grade teacher warned our class, “Never end a story with, ‘It was all a dream!’” She sounded thoroughly sick and tired of stories like that. I remember thinking that one of my favorite books ends with Alice waking from the long summer-afternoon dream that begins with her chasing the White Rabbit. Even so, my teacher’s advice sounded correct. Writing “It was all a dream” seemed crude and…immature.

 

Years later, another teacher read Delmore Schwartz’s classic short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” aloud to our college class. As the story begins, its narrator is sitting in a theater, watching a film:

It is a silent picture, as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps, and the actors, too, seem to jump about, walking too fast. The shots are full of rays and dots, as if it had been raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

 

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother.

In the film, the narrator’s parents go on a date to Coney Island. They stroll on the boardwalk, look at the sea, have their portrait taken. Schwartz’s sentences are simple, cadenced, evocative, and graceful. Finally, the courting couple has a fierce argument outside and then inside a fortuneteller’s studio, and the narrator’s father stalks off.

 

Suddenly terrified—partly, we presume, by the possibility that, if this disagreement is not resolved, he may never be born—the narrator rises from his seat and begins to shout. What is the couple doing? “Why doesn’t my mother go after my father and beg him not to be angry?” Though it is all a dream, Schwartz’s story never fails to deliver a jolt of the mysterious, of melancholy, anxiety, and of admiration for what he has accomplished in this masterpiece of fewer than ten pages.

 

Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into. By the end of the first paragraph of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor has noticed his arched, dome-like brown belly, his numerous waving legs. “What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.”

 

If Schwartz’s story represents one of literature’s most blatant violations of my middle-school teacher’s advice, possibly the boldest use of dreams in fiction occurs in Anna Karenina. In the work of a lesser writer, we might pay only minimal attention to the nightmare Vronsky has, early in Part Four—a dream about a scruffy old peasant with a tattered beard: stooped over, doing something, muttering to himself in French. It occupies the few sentences that separate the obligations Vronksy has undertaken, showing a foreign prince around town, from his visit to see Anna. Extremely upset, she has begged him to come, despite the fact that she is still living with her husband, who knows that Vronsky is her lover and has forbidden her to receive him at home.

 

What makes Anna so distraught, and what makes Vronsky’s dream lodge in our own minds—what makes it so much more than a simple description of a character’s dream—is that she cannot stop thinking about a nightmare she has had, in which a bearded old peasant was bent over, rummaging in a sack, muttering to himself in French something about iron, the iron must be beaten. She dreamed she woke up and asked a servant what the dream signified and was told that it meant she was going to die in childbirth. Vronksy tells Anna it’s nonsense. But, unnerved by the fact that they have dreamed the same dream, he feels that his attempt to reassure her lacks conviction.



David Levine

Vladimir Nabokov

Readers will recall that by this point, Anna and Vronsky’s love affair is already clouded by tensions that will continue to grow as the book progresses. Anna is jealous of the life Vronsky leads without her, and though he still loves her, he notes that she has put on weight and no longer seems quite the same woman he fell in love with. A divide has opened between them, yet they are dreaming the same dream! Had something similar happened earlier—say, after the couple met and before they became lovers—it might have seemed “romantic” at the cost of depth and complex verisimilitude. And whatever dream they shared would probably have been about something other than the scary, bearded peasant, mumbling in French.

 

It’s a risky and daring plot turn, one with which Tolstoy tests our belief in the apparently paranormal bonds that passion and intimacy can forge. Despite their disagreements, the lovers are more closely entwined and know more about one another than either one understands or might knowingly choose. By the end of the novel, the dreams will turn out to have been premonitory, as Anna fears, but they are warnings about a death quite different from the one she has imagined.

 

Nabokov devotes several pages of his Lectures on Russian Literature to what he calls The Double Nightmare in Tolstoy’s novel, tracking the dreams’ antecedents in the couple’s shared experience—most notably, an accident in which a man is crushed on the tracks near the train in which Anna and Vronsky first meet. Predictably, Nabokov has no patience for Freud. “I am politely but firmly opposed to the Freudian interpretation of dreams with its stress on symbols which may have some reality in the Viennese Doctor’s rather drab and pedantic mind but do not necessarily have any in the minds of individuals unconditioned by modern psychoanalytics.” And yet the enthusiasm and the conviction with which he and others have parsed the twin dreams in Anna Karenina are not so very unlike the dogged way in which Freud delves into his patients’ dreams.

 

Tolstoy showed it was possible to give a character a dream that strikes the reader as plausible, convincing, important enough to pay attention to, without being heavy-handedly symbolic or portentous. Or boring. What’s harder to recreate on the page is anything remotely resembling the experience of actually dreaming, with all the structural and narrative complexities involved, the leaps, contradictions, and improbable elements. Maybe that was my seventh-grade teacher’s problem: She’d read too many middle-school accounts of dreams that were nothing like dreams.

 

The most sustained and artful literary recreations of the dream state I know occur in Bruno Schulz’s stories, especially in “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, ” which, in Celina Wienewska’s elegant translation, unfolds in the present tense and in the straightforward tone of someone describing a dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch or at the breakfast table. Consider this summary of the story’s opening sections: Joseph, the narrator, sets out on a long, halting, and peculiar train journey, then arrives in a desolate landscape and finally at the sanitorium, where he has booked a room. He is eyeing the cakes in the restaurant when he is called to see the doctor. It turns out that Joseph has come to see his father. But there is some uncertainty, as there so often is in dreams, about whether his father is living or dead. Joseph’s father is dead, the doctor says, but not to worry, all of the sanitorium patients are also dead, and none of them know it.

 

Joseph crawls into bed with his father and falls asleep. When he wakes, Father, “wearing a black suit of English cloth, which he had made only the previous summer,” announces his plan to open a shop. And now the narrator is wandering through a city with an unsettling resemblance to the city in which he lives. Somehow he finds his father’s shop, where he is given a package containing a pornographic book he has ordered. But the book is out of stock, and instead he has been sent an expanding telescope: “Like a large black caterpillar, the telescope crept into the lighted shop—an enormous paper arthropod with two imitation headlights on the front.”

 

Time moves strangely. Joseph encounters his father in unexpected places: a restaurant, back in bed, surrounded by a large crowd. Returning to the sanitorium, he is frightened by a chained watchdog that turns out to be a chained man, whom he releases. Transported back to the station, Joseph boards a train. “Farewell, Father. Farewell, town that I shall never see again.”

 

He begins to travel continuously, and the story ends:

My suit becomes torn and ragged. I have been given the shabby uniform of a railwayman. My face is bandaged with a dirty rag, because one of my cheeks is swollen…I stand in the corridor outside a second-class compartment and sing. People throw small coins into my hat: a black railwayman’s hat, its visor half torn away.

Schulz never frames the story as having been “all a dream.” We know it and we don’t, just as we know it and we don’t when we ourselves are dreaming.

 

A few days after writing the sentence above, I decided to delete a dream sequence from the novel on which I’ve been working. It took me another day or so to make the connection between the blog post and my decision to cut a passage that had survived for four years and through, let’s say, forty drafts. Having reread Schwartz and Schulz, I’d realized that the dream in my novel didn’t sound like a dream but rather like a novelist’s attempt to signal that a character knows more about the present—and the future—than he realizes. After reading Tolstoy’s double dream, my character’s nightmare seemed timid and conventional. I’d grown fond of the passage, and I missed it. Briefly.