Writing advice from Roald Dahl

As a child, I loved the books of Roald Dahl. It’s an infatuation that’s carried into adulthood. Although primarily known for such classics as James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Matilda, his short stories for adults are grim, creepy delights. If you haven’t read Switch Bitch, Over to You, Someone Like You, or any of his other short story collections, stop what you’re doing right now and order them. You won’t regret it!

In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Features, Dahl lists what he considers to be the seven most important traits of a fiction writer. Although I write nonfiction, I still find these relevant:

You should have a lively imagination.

You should be able to write well. By that, I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in a reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift and you either have it or you don’t.

You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you’re doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month.

You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

You must have strong self-discipline. You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.

It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humour. This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital.

You must have a degree of humility. The writer who thinks that is work is marvelous his heading for trouble.

You can find this list—and recorded interviews with Dahl—on the Roald Dahl website.

Truman Capote on writing

I’ve always enjoyed Truman Capote’s writing and his flamboyant personality. The guy was a stellar talent. In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s are well worth the time–but if you haven’t read his collected short stories, I highly recommend you do so. Brilliant stuff. Recently, I stumbled across an interview Capote gave to The Paris Review in 1957, during which he discussed his early ambition to be a writer and the art of crafting short stories. Here are some highlights.

On when he first started writing at the age of 10 or 11:

I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which, but I wanted it badly. I had been noticing the activities of some neighbors who were up to no good, so I wrote a kind of roman à clef called “Old Mr. Busybody” and entered it in the contest. The first installment appeared one Sunday, under my real name of Truman Streckfus Persons. Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing.

On the moment he realized he wanted to be a writer:

I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn’t sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning’s mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!

On controlling your material:

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.

On developing a short-story technique:

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can’t generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

On improving one’s technique:

Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.

Read the full interview here.