como escreve Miguel Esteves Cardoso

Quando eu leio um texto bem escrito, tenho a impressão que o autor escreve sem esforço algum. Que as palavras fluem naturalmente e o texto vai tomando forma quase como se a coisa toda independesse da vontade de quem escreveu.

E talvez isso se dê exatamente assim com alguns autores.

Mas não com Miguel Esteves Cardoso.

Quando começas a escrever, tens um plano concreto do que será a crónica?
Tenho. Passo pelo menos um dia inteiro a pensar no que vou dizer, mas a pensar mesmo, entre dicionários e apontamentos. Muitos apontamentos. Um moleskine dá-me só para duas crónicas. E aproveito apenas uma pequeníssima percentagem dessas ideias. Uma vez em cada mil, quando faço menos apontamentos, consigo pôr tudo o que pensei dentro da crónica. Mas essas não são as que ficam melhor.

É óbvio que te preocupas muito com o estilo e essa preocupação pode ser um martírio, como explicava o Flaubert.
É um martírio, sim. Toda a gente que escreve crónicas para jornais aprende a aceitar o facto de que muitas vezes o que se entrega é uma merda.

Tens algum mecanismo de auto-avaliação para dizer “isto não presta”?
Sim, sim. Toda a gente tem. Mesmo no seu auge, uma pessoa entrega, no máximo dos máximos, uma crónica boa, sabendo que a seguinte vai ser uma merda, e a seguinte também, e a seguinte também. Ou seja, uma crónica boa em cada quatro. Estou a falar a sério. Já cheguei a pensar que a sequência média era: crónica boa, merda, crónica boa, merda. Mas não é. E se por acaso fizeres duas crónica boas, intervaladas com uma de merda, logo a seguir tens merda, merda, merda, merda, merda.

Daqui.

podcast com James Wood

Alguém gravou uma palestra de 30 minutos de James Wood na livraria de Harvard, onde ele falou do seu livro “How Fiction Works”, que eu estou lendo e gostando muito — como acontece com quase tudo o que leio dele.

E o site ThoughCast colocou à disposição aqui pra quem quiser ouvir.

ainda não decidi…

se esta é uma boa idéia ou se é uma coisa totalmente idiota.

Estou pendendo pra última. Mas achei irresistível.

Em todo caso, começa hoje. Então se te interessa, corra pra se inscrever.

é matemático

There is a way in which even complex prose is quite simple — because of that mathematical finality by which a perfect sentence cannot admit of an infinite number of variations, cannot be extended without aesthetic blight: its perfection is the solution to its own puzzle; it could not be done better.

James Wood in “How Fiction Works”

mostre, em seu texto, quem você é de verdade

Olha que interessante esse texto de Kurt Vonnegut sobre estilo. Ele diz coisas que você, provavelmente, já sabe, mas o início tem uma grande sacada.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

degustação na livraria

Uma volta pela Livraria Cultura no conjunto Nacional é uma aula sobre como o Brasil vai mal das pernas também na área de publicação, embora os negócios, aparentemente, vão muito bem, obrigado. Passei uma noite na seção de filosofia e antropologia e fiquei abismada com a quantidade de porcaria publicada.

A primeira coisa que chama a atenção numa livraria brasileira é o cuidado que as editoras têm com a aparência dos livros. Coisas como o design da capa, a qualidade do papel, o tipo de fonte.

Existem muitos tipos de livros. Há aqueles que existem para serem saboreados com os sentidos. Têm mais fotos e ilustrações que texto. Desenhos, há aos montes. Você sente a textura do papel com a ponta dos dedos. Chega o papel perto do nariz pra sentir  cheiro da combinação tinta e papel. Boa parte do prazer está em folhear estes livros. E há os livros cujo forte são as idéias que apresentam. Nada de ilustrações. Nem um mísero desenhinho. O brasileiro não gosta de livros de jeito nenhum, mas odeia especialmente este tipo. Ainda dá pra encarar os que têm figurinhas. Mas sem elas, aí é pedir muito.

Os livros de filosofia e antropologia se encaixam nessa segunda categoria. A dos chatinhos. Então as editoras, querendo expandir sua clientela para além dos universitários duros – que, todo mundo sabe, vivem mesmo é de xerox -, investem pesadamente na aparência do livro. Os livros são lindos. As capas são magníficas. O cheiro da tinta no papel faz a gente querer lamber a folha (ou talvez eu esteja sozinha nessa). A fonte escolhida é diferente – até distrai a atenção do que está escrito. Mas e as idéias por trás das palavras? Uma frustração a cada frase.

Coisa mais fácil publicar um livro no Brasil. E lembrando de uma conversa na comunidade dos tradutores do Orkut que li hoje mesmo, aqui, onde se publica muita porcaria, publica-se, também, muita coisa traduzida porcamente, viu? Ter um livro publicado não é atestado de competência.

Agora quando vou na Cultura, nem leio mais a orelha do livro pra decidir se compro ou não. Sinto o livro com a ponta dos dedos, dou uma pancadinha e cheiro o papel. Então olho pros dois lados e dou uma lambidinha numa página do meio.

a guide to writing well

um link utilíssimo

Wood e o romance moderno

Mais James Wood. Trechos de uma entrevista onde ele critica o romance moderno. Pessoalmente, acho que muito do que ele fala se aplica ao romance moderno brasileiro.

What I’m most interested in, as a critic, is what we might nebulously call human truth a true account of the world as we experience it, and of the full difficulty of being in that world. Creating living characters, and writing fiction expressing what Henry James called “the present palpable intimate,” entails, for me at least, some kind of morality. Requiring readers to put themselves into the minds of many different kinds of other people is a moral action on the part of the author. So when I feel that reality is being exaggerated or made cartoonish which is what I mean by hysterical realism seems to me that one crucial issue at stake is morality.

(…)

It might sound strange, since I criticize writers like Don DeLillo so fiercely, but I do like novels set clearly in the present age, novels full of palpabilities. I think that’s what the novel can still do better than any other medium journalism doesn’t provide me with news about the current state of the soul. Part of my anxiety and unease about novels by Foster Wallace, Franzen, and others is that they have swallowed a great deal of journalism, sociology, and cultural studies, which means they are no longer doing something that’s not replaceable that another medium can’t do as well or better.

(…)

If an earlier generation of writers Pynchon and DeLillo, for example took too many drugs, the current crop may have taken too many critical theory seminars. Instead of resisting virulent new forms of inauthenticity, they often settle for satirizing the culture always an easy thing to do. But a novel that doesn’t practice resistance isn’t earning its keep.

realismo e personagens

 Mais sobre realismo em ficção. Desta vez, James Wood fala sobre realismo na caracterização de personagens.

To argue that we can know Jean Brodie just as deeply as we can know George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, to argue that lacunae are as deep as solidities, that absence in characterisation can be a form of knowing as profound as presence, that Spark’s and Saramago’s and Nabokov’s characters can move us as much as James’s and Eliot’s, is to concede nothing to Gass’s scepticism. Not all of these characters have the same amount of realised “depth”, but all of them are objects of perception, to use Gass’s words, and things that can be correctly said of persons can also be said of them. They are all “real”, but in different ways. That reality level differs from author to author, and our hunger for the particular depth or reality level of a character is tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions of each book. This is how we can read WG Sebald one day and Virginia Woolf or Philip Roth the next, and not demand that each resemble the other. It would be an obvious category error to accuse Sebald of not offering us “deep” or “rounded” characters. I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or “deep” enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author, unfairly, for not giving us enough – the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough.

realismo em ficção

Uma explicação sobre o que é realismo em ficção. E porque não é o que a maioria pensa. Apareceu nessa resenha do livro “How fiction Works” de James Wood, ainda a ser lançado.

Wood cites American novelist Rick Moody, who says the realistic novel needs “a kick in the ass”, as “it’s politically and philosophically dubious and often dull”. This, argues Wood, is nonsense, and based on a misunderstanding of what realism actually is and what the novel’s relationship to it is. While novels may appear realistic, they are still novels – artifices, whose reality is that which the novelist chooses to present to us.

Great novelists, says Wood, such as Flaubert or Henry James or Saul Bellow, offer their readers a world in which “reality” is not a mirror of the “real” world but of their manufacture. Bad writers do not appreciate this, for “they assume that the world can be described”.

“In America,” Wood adds, “the battle lines are more fiercely drawn up than in Europe because of the tendency on the realist side to be somewhat anti-intellectual and masculinist – that whole sort of post-Hemingway line. A writer I admire, like Richard Ford, say, would probably be thought of by people like writer and academic David Foster Wallace as prehistoric, unintellectual. I don’t think that’s fair. But there has been a tendency in American writing schools to enforce a slightly unthinking realism.

Begley, Nabokov, and the break in one’s own destiny

Louis Begley, no livro The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues):

Even though I am told that my writing does not show signs of rigor mortis, it is a fact that I write slowly and laboriously, pausing after every word I set down. I change it countless times and repeat the process with each sentence and paragraph before I can move forward. The vision of Trollope composing the Barchester novels in a railroad car, traveling desk balanced on his knees, with hardly an erasure or addition needed before the manuscript went off to the publisher, fills me with admiration, envy, and dull despair. I too can perform on the high wire when I write a legal text or an essay; writing fiction I need to keep my feet on the ground. Perfectionism and perennial dissatisfaction with everything I do are not alone to blame: it seems to me that when I write in English I lack normal spontaneity, let alone the unbeatable self-assurance a writer needs to soar or to be outrageous. I know that I do manage from time to time to be outrageous in my fiction, but the stress falls on the verb “manage.” Nothing about those effects is instant. The truth is that even today, after an immersion of more than fifty-five years in the English language, I am never completely confident that I have gotten right whatever it is that I write down, certainly not on the first try. Knowing objectively that often—perhaps most often—in fact I do, is not a consolation. In that respect only, I am not unlike my great countryman, Joseph Conrad. But Conrad had more of an excuse: he began to learn English only at the age of twenty-one; he was thirty-eight when his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published, and he had spent most of the intervening years on the high seas. Vladimir Nabokov’s command of the English language is a different case altogether. English was in effect Nabokov’s first language: he learned to read it before he could read Russian. Becoming thoroughly proficient in a “civilized” tongue, usually the French, and leaving the vernacular for latter, to be absorbed as a part of growing up, was usual in the nineteenth century among Slavic upper-class families. There was a series of English and French governesses who took care of the Nabokov children, and it wasn’t until Vladimir was seven that his father, alarmed by his sons’ backwardness in their native language, engaged the schoolmaster from the village adjoining the family estate to teach them to read and write in Russian.To go back to the torment I experienced revising the manuscript of my most recent novel, its immediate cause was the number of times my editor was in essence questioning my diction, the correctedness of the way I expressed myself in English. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t always right. What hurt was the contrast between his instinctive grasp of how one would normally say whatever it was that I wanted to express and my doubts: my need to grope to find the way, to test each sentence by reading it aloud. He had kept his birthright—the ability to use his mother tongue in his calling—and I had lost mine.

(…)

The Polish language has been a source of undiluted joy for me, and it pains me to make an admission that may make me seem unfaithful to my first love. But the plain truth is that I consider myself also supremely lucky to be an American novelist, using a language of incomparable beauty and access to readers, a language that for all the difficulties I have described is totally my own. In this respect as well, my case is very different from Nabokov’s, as he described it in an afterword to Lolita:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

Tragedy, surely, but one that was embedded in triumph. (…) I follow Nabokov’s advice, and take the tragedy seriously only because Nabokov’s intimate wound was surely very real, as is the wound inflicted by every exile, whatever its circumstances and aftermath. The wound is one that never heals, even if one can say with Nabokov, as I do, quite heartlessly: “The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds.”

circus biped

Bert Keizer comparando o holandês e o inglês no livro “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

Sobre holandeses escrevendo em inglês:

In Holland, and in many other parts of the world, the type of idolatry I was talking about earlier is one of the most repulsive effects of the fact that English is now lording it globally. (…)

I don’t think it really matters when you are dealing with atoms, bridges, teeth, arteries, or gamma rays, but when you are writing about people and ought to throw in a little of your own personality in order to infuse some life into the thing, the handicap of having to do this in English is severely debilitating. People rarely realize this and therefore tend to use English as if it were a dead language, like Esperanto, with an equally lifeless outcome.
(…)
There is a vast difference between showing someone the way to the railway station in English and showing him the way to Plato. This is often overlooked by city-map speakers.

E sobre a experiência de escrever em inglês, acho que ninguém conseguiu definir melhor. Achei esta analogia simplesmente fantástica:

Writing in English at first felt to me like trying to plough a stretch of marble an ungainly procedure, ruining some pretty nice material, and the result was nil. I feel reasonably comfortable now writing in English—though please note that is something I would never say about writing in Dutch. Why not? Well, it’s the difference between a natural biped (man) and a circus biped (dog). You wouldn’t ever say to a human that you admire the way he manages so well on two legs, while a dog is applauded for just this feat. The dream of a foreigner writer using English is that the natives will forget about his dogginess and say to each other: I just love the way he moves.

But, comfortable or not, I still have to shrug off a slight resentment at having to put on these funny clothes in order to be let in. I suppose that I could counter this by pitying you for missing out on certain Dutch authors whose virtues I couldn’t begin to try to expound to you—no more than I could give someone an idea of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar-playing by whistling a few notes. Though I wouldn’t argue absolutely against this possibility, the fact is that I cannot do it right here.

Sim, sim, também sinto o mesmo, Sr. Keizer. Mas fiquei pensando em Machado de Assis e de repente fiquei tão feliz de ter crescido falando português.

Škvorecký e suas duas línguas

Agora é a vez de Josef Škvorecký falar da experiência de escrever numa língua estrangeira. É dele o terceiro texto do livro “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

O primeiro trecho descreve uma experiência que eu também tive com o português, depois que saí do Brasil:

A strange thing and Henry Miller got it right. Surrounded by the sounds of the foreign language—speaking, on a daily basis, my very good English, as friends kindly assured me—my eyes, my ears, my inner receptive organs became attuned to Czech to a much higher degree of precision than back in Bohemia. I awakened to aspects of my mother tongue of which formerly I was unaware, having used them subconsciously, mechanically. The sex appeal of feminine endings, the lure of verbal aspects, the capricious scherzos of prefixes, such things.

A segunda passagem fala do poder da linguagem apesar dos problemas com textos mal-traduzidos. Škvorecký, como ele mesmo diz, também traduziu.

The reviewers never read my novels as I had written them in my “small”—for most American critics, even “obscure”—language. They read only translations. And I thought of my early days, of the Sinclairs and Dickenses, and Dreisers, not to speak of Curwoods and Setons and Edgar Rice Burroughses, all of them enjoyed in dubious—no: bad—no: horrible translations, translations really insulting to sensitive speakers of the obscure language of the westernmost Slavs. And I wondered. What made me enjoy Mr. Babbitt, who constantly used the second person plural in addressing his children, his wife, his closest friends? What made me ignore the shocking impoliteness of characters who addressed their physicians with the disrespectful “Doctor,” not “Mr. Doctor”? What made me so imperceptive of the twisted sentences that slavishly followed the word order of the originals? Did they sound alluringly exotic? Sweetly foreign? What made me not wonder about a military band in Thackeray whose bulky musician played very loudly on the dulcimer? All that?

Surely, there was nothing resembling genius in the language of those translations. Yet the novels spoke to me, with great intensity. So strongly that they decided my future. True, there was Eliot, whom I first read in English, then years later in a supposedly good Czech translation, who, after the true magic of “Because I do not hope. . . ,” was almost torture. Was it Josef Hora’s labor devoted to each word which the translator, paid by that word, obviously neglected? Something else?

For a decade of my life, when my own efforts were banned, I turned translator myself. The experience taught me to appreciate my excellent translators in Canada. I bitterly learned what it was to cleanse your text of the abundance of auxiliary verbs so foreign to Czech, of the prevalence of the passive voice, of possessive pronouns used with parts of the human body, all these and other translators’ errors which so uglified the American magic of Faulkner, the British acrimony of Waugh, the translucency of Hemingway’s diction. Would any American monolingual or even—in the major languages—bilingual or trilingual reviewer dare to say what the late Czech critic said about my sentences?

No, and it wouldn’t be their fault. Although they were unaware of my originals, their reviews were rarely scathing, often favorable. What about language, then? What is it that makes even books that present only a ragged shadow of their model enjoyable, even enthralling? What makes a teenager in a landlocked little country ruled and butchered by foreign invaders and mighty Big Daddies enter the skin of an illiterate boy from Missouri, of a nigger slave—enter a world as far away as the stars?

Yes, language can be of supreme beauty. But there is more to works of fiction than just language. Style in Chandler’s sense, the experience of Dickens but also that of Henry James, of life’s martyrdom or of life’s sweet mellowness, and many other things.

Let’s leave it to the horses, they have bigger heads.

Or perhaps to the elephants.

the way back

Bharati Mukherjee escreve  o primeiro ensaio do livro que trata do desafio de nascer num universo linguístico e terminar escrevendo profissionalmente em inglês. O livro é “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

Um trecho que me chamou a atenção:

As a novelist, I now melt down the cultural borders of my legacies. The fluid concept of time inherited through Bangla’s use of kal and the “magic realism” inherited from the Hindu epics inform my writing about immigrants in North American cities. Now I write in my third language, American, another “deviant dialect” of the E. M. Forsterian British I learned as authoritative, and in which, in fact, I wrote my first novel and earliest stories.

My mother tongue was a linguistic primer, a thin white-wash over all that is pre-conscious and pre-rational. It was in English that I began to apologize. Successive coats of French and English have faceted Bangla, but it still shines through. It is the odd fate of so many of us in the global community, not just those of us from India but from other homelands at ease in family-time and epic storytelling, that a second language, a school language, was necessary to liberate their minds from their bodies, their self from their community.

Two selves exist within the language-adoptee, as with any adoptee—what might have been, what was lost, and the good fortune, the delivery from want and frustration. For a writer, the melting of a mother tongue is the madeleine, the way back, and the way in, an early loss with the deepest memory, the mother of all plots.

writerisms

Estas são informações preciosas que C.J. Cherryh coletou para aspirantes a escritores de ficção. Completamente adaptáveis ao português.
Trechos:

If a manuscript looks as if it’s sprouted leaves and branches, if every verb is “unusual,” if the vocabulary is more interesting than the story … fix it by going to more ordinary verbs. There are vocabulary-addicts who will praise your prose for this but not many who can simultaneously admire your verbs as verbs and follow your story, especially if it has content. The car is not a main actor and not one you necessarily need to make into a character. If its action should be more ordinary and transparent, don’t use an odd expression. This is prose.

(…)

With apologies to hard-working English teachers, school English is not fiction English.

Understand that the meticulous English style you labored over in school, including the use of complete sentences and the structure of classic theme-sentence paragraphs, was directed toward the production of non-fiction reports, resumes, and other non-fiction applications.

The first thing you have to do to write fiction? Suspect all the English style you learned in school and violate rules at need. Many of those rules will turn out to apply; many won’t.

(…)
As a general rule, use a major or stand-out vocabulary word only once a paragraph, maybe twice a page, and if truly outre, only once per book. Parallels are clear and proper exceptions to this, and don’t vary your word choice to the point of silliness.