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The Art of Writing Fiction

An elegant and intimate insight into the personal and practical

processes of writing, Andrew Cowan’s The Art of Writing Fiction
draws on his experience as a prize-​winning novelist and his work
with emerging writers at the University of East Anglia.
As illuminating for the recreational writer as for students of
Creative Writing, the twelve chapters of this book correspond to the
twelve weeks of a typical university syllabus, and provide guidance
on mastering key aspects of fiction such as structure, character,
voice, point of view, and setting, as well as describing techniques for
stimulating creativity and getting the most out of feedback.
This new edition offers extended consideration to structure, point
of view, and the organisation of time in the novel, as well as the
conduct of the Creative Writing workshop in the light of the
decolonising the curriculum movement. It features additional writing
exercises, as well as an afterword with invaluable advice on
approaching agents and publishers. The range of writers surveyed is
greatly expanded, finding inspiration and practical guidance in the
work of Margaret Atwood, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Richard Beard, Tsitsi
Dangarembga, Richard Ford, Ashley Hickson-​Lovence, Anjali Joseph,
James Joyce, James Kelman, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Sam
Selvon, Vikram Seth, and Ali Smith, among many others.
With over 80 writing exercises and examples taken from dozens
of novels and short stories, the new edition of The Art of Writing
Fiction is enriched by the author’s own experience as a novelist and
lecturer, making it an essential guide for readers interested in the
theory, teaching, and practice of Creative Writing.
Andrew Cowan is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the
University of East Anglia. He is the author of six novels, including Pig
(Sceptre, 2002) and, most recently, Your Fault (Salt, 2019), and the
winner of numerous literary awards. He is also the author of the
monograph Against Creative Writing (Routledge, 2023), a defence of
the art of writing.
The Art of Writing Fiction

Second Edition

Andrew Cowan
Cover image: © Getty Images

Second edition published 2024

by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2024 Andrew Cowan

The right of Andrew Cowan to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

First edition published by Pearson Education Limited 2011

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cowan, Andrew, author.
Title: The art of writing fiction / Andrew Cowan.
Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023005232 (print) | LCCN 2023005233 (ebook) | ISBN
9781138593671 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138593695 (paperback) | ISBN
9780429489303 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction-Authorship. | Creative writing.
Classification: LCC PN3355 .C69 2023 (print) | LCC PN3355 (ebook) | DDC 808.3—
dc23/eng/20230317
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005232
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005233

ISBN: 978-1-138-59367-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-59369-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-48930-3 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489303

Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
Contents

Introduction

1 Writers’ routines
1. When where what…
2. Time-wasting
3. Friends and foes
4. What where when…

2 Write about what you know: Observational journals

5. Keeping an observational journal
6. Keeping a scrapbook
7. Weather report
8. Street life
9. Workplace
10. Home life

3 Write about what you don’t know you know: Automatic writing
11. First thoughts
12. First things
13. First thoughts, second thoughts
14. First drafts

4 Don’t tell me…

 15. Telling it slant
16. Don’t mention it
17. How does this feel?
18. Sightless
19. Hyacinths
20. Scene and summary

5 Write about what you used to know: Remembering and place

21. Lost things
22. Lost lands
23. Lost selves
24. Lost loves
25. ‘Lost’
26. Departures
27. Typical
28. Untypical
29. A place
30. A person

6 Write about who you know: Character

31. A portrait of yourself as you are to yourself
32. A portrait of yourself as you are to someone else
33. Twenty questions
34. Q&A gimmick
35. Notes towards a character
36. Envelopes
37. A character as an item of furniture
 38. Still life
39. Two characters

7 Voices
40. Oral history
41. Conversation
42. Formatting dialogue
43. Dramatic twist
44. Cross-purposes
45. Vernacular voices
46. In summary

8 Viewpoints
47. Something is happening out there
48. Something else is happening
49. Captors and captives
50. Eye witness
51. You
52. You, too
53. Third, and finally

9 Middles, ends, beginnings: Structure

54. Story vs plot
55. Diagnostics
56. Beginning middle end
57. Because
58. n times what happened once
 59. Pause
60. Middle beginning end
61. End middle beginning
62. Sub-plotting
63. Shuffling
64. Never mind ‘because’…
65. Mapping
66. Rearranging

10 Making strange: Defamiliarisation

67. Literally
68. Figuratively
69. Lipogram
70. Given words
71. Given moods
72. Exercises in style
73. Mathews’s Algorithm (almost)
74. Horizontal
75. Vertical

11 Making clear: Revision, grammar, and punctuation

76. Punctuation
77. Some more First Thoughts
78. Prepositions
79. Checklist
80. Next thoughts
81. Simple
 82. Compound
83. Complex
84. Compound-complex

12 Workshopping

Appendix: Approaching agents & publishers

85. Approaching agents & publishers

Bibliography
Index
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9780429489303-1

Introductions are the first thing a reader will read, but often the last
thing a writer will write. This introduction is no different. The book
you’re about to read has, as I type these words, already been
written. In fact, it’s been written twice. The first edition was
published a dozen or so years ago. More recently I’ve completed this
revised, updated edition. So, I’ve done all the work – I’ve done it
twice – and now I can account for my intentions and the ways in
which I may have deviated from them, and perhaps offer some
guidance on how to approach the exercises, and explain certain
usages and conventions, and describe how this version differs from
the original. I might attempt to reassure you about my competence
to write a book about writing. Certainly I ought to be clear about my
anticipated audience; I should be clear about ‘you’.
As originally conceived, then, this book was designed to appeal as
a university-level coursebook, and that remains the case. The twelve
chapters correspond to the twelve weeks of a university semester,
and are structured more or less in line with my undergraduate
syllabus at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where I’ve taught
since 2002. The chapters resemble my lessons. They come in much
the same order, and contain much the same material, and the
exercises appear pretty much where they would appear in those
lessons. In the earlier chapters I’m more concerned with generating
material, in the middle chapters with shaping that material, and in
the later chapters with reviewing the material – not quite ‘first
thoughts, second thoughts, afterthoughts’, but something like that.
However, with so much more space on the page than I’m ever
allowed in the classroom, the discussion has become longer, the
examples more detailed, the exercises more numerous – and this
new edition is a little longer still. In places, my book has begun to
resemble a memoir, and while I shouldn’t be surprised by this, the
pleasure I took in writing it (and then re-writing it) may reflect
something of my relief at finding I wasn’t after all compiling a
textbook.
I hope it’s less generic, more personal than that, not least
because I came to teaching through the residential courses offered
by the Arvon Foundation in the UK, and my approach in the
university classroom – anecdotal, practical, relatively informal –
derives from that more ‘recreational’ experience. Arvon courses
happen throughout the year, in remote rural locations, and typically
involve sixteen students and two tutors who eat, sleep, and drink
writing for five days more or less without distraction. Several of the
exercises in this book were devised for such courses; several others
were filched from my co-tutors while teaching them. This book is
therefore intended to appeal to that kind of non-academic audience,
too.
That said, a good deal of the more extended commentary
between the exercises derives from conversations I’ve had with my
Masters and PhD students at UEA – both in workshops and in
individual tutorials – and is informed by an awareness of literary
theory and the ever-evolving literary canon, while certain other
passages have their origin in conversations with fellow academics,
and so I hope this book will be of interest to them, too. Like most of
us, I’ve read a great many Creative Writing guidebooks – sometimes
willingly – and usually I look to them for two things: new exercises
to try out in the classroom and new ways of presenting key
concepts. So this book is also intended for the likes of me; it’s
intended for other writers and teachers of writing.
But if this is beginning to sound like my anticipated audience is
‘everyone’ – or that ‘you’ are pretty much ‘anyone’ – I ought to offer
at least one qualification: I don’t believe you can be a writer unless
you are also a reader. If writing is the out-breath, the exhalation,
then reading should be the in-breath, the inspiration. And if you
aren’t already an enthusiastic and habitual reader of short stories
and novels, I doubt you’ll have much use for this book.
Of course, your writing will derive from personal experience (what
you know), as well as from research and what you are able to invent
or imagine (what you don’t know, yet). But it will also spring from
your awareness of language, and especially of literary language. This
is your medium – the stuff from which you will fashion your fictions
– and the more you’re aware of the fictions that have preceded you
and which surround you, the more conscious you’ll become of the
possibilities of the form and what you can do with it.
For most of us, that awareness will be acquired by a kind of
osmosis, almost unconsciously, since we read in the main for
entertainment, for delight. Our lifelong immersion in the fictions of
others will help us acquire a degree of technical understanding that
may come to feel instinctive or common-sensical. But as writers we
will often also want to read analytically and for instruction – to learn
about method and style – and this so-called ‘reading as a writer’ will
tend to be deliberate, a fully conscious activity involving marks in the
margin, memos to self, scribblings in notebooks.
Whether these two modes of reading can happen simultaneously
is something I doubt. It may be possible to oscillate between them,
but I suspect that most of us will read initially for pleasure, then
return with a more enquiring or critical eye in order to understand
something of the nuts and bolts of what we have already read. And
this is a practice I would encourage. For as long as seems useful at
least, I would suggest you keep a record of your reading, making
notes on the mechanics – as you observe them – of constructing
successful short stories and novels. Chapters 4 to 9 in this book
should provide a guide to what to look for, the kinds of questions
you might be asking of the writing of others. But this needn’t be
arduous; it shouldn’t be a chore. If your inclination is simply to jot
down arresting images, neat turns of phrase, unusual details, then
that should be enough. My own notebook, for instance, has come to
resemble a swag-bag, a collection of thievings from other writers –
all their shiniest sentences – including this line from one of Samuel
Beckett’s later short fictions, Worstward Ho, which has become for
me a kind of mantra, a consolation whenever my achievements on
the page fall short of my ambitions:

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It is an underlying premise of this book that writing is an on-going

process, perfection impossible, completion elusive, and while this
line from Worstward Ho encapsulates that thought, I know I’m not
the first to have discovered it. It appears to have become something
of a slogan in the teaching of Creative Writing, in fact. And just as
mine is not the first guidebook to quote it, nor will I be the last to
draw on the words of Dorothea Brande, Flannery O’Connor, or John
Gardner, whom I mention in several of the chapters that follow.
There is one good reason for this: they are often (though not
always) among the wisest of writers on writing. But I have sought to
compensate for their ubiquity by incorporating into my commentary
several other, less orthodox names: for example, the seventeenth
century French courtier and soldier the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, or
the Russian Formalist critics Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Tomashevsky
(both of whom are key figures in the history of literary theory, but
maybe less key to the teaching of Creative Writing).
Some of my literary exemplars are likewise already well-known.
Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, for instance, must
be the most frequently quoted of all short stories in the Creative
Writing classroom. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ and
Tobias Wolff’s ‘Bullet in the Brain’ cannot be far behind. But many of
my other choices will reflect the idiosyncrasies of my own reading. In
this revised edition, many will also reflect the impact on my reading
of the ‘decolonising the curriculum’ movement, which has lately, and
belatedly, brought about a reconsideration in every subject area of
what we teach and how and why we teach it. In Creative Writing,
this inevitably requires a rethink of our reading lists, though it entails
a good deal more than that, including a greater sensitivity to the
question of ‘voice’, both in the classroom and on the page: who
speaks, and to whom; who is invited into the conversation, and who
may become silenced?
Despite its occasional bad press, decolonisation certainly isn’t
about ‘cancellation’. It isn’t a matter of toppling the literary canon, as
if the canon were as fixed in stone as a municipal statue. Rather, it
seeks to understand what we might call ‘canonicity’; that is, the
question of which authors and which books get favoured, and which
get overlooked, and why? In Creative Writing, this often extends to
the question of craft and technique and why we might value certain
conventions over others, since what appears to be universal might
well turn out to be local – particular to a certain time in history, or a
certain cultural tradition, or even sector of society.
With this in mind, I haven’t retained or replaced any of my
exemplars without first considering its continuing relevance. More
often than not, I’ve added a new example rather than removing an
old one; that is, I’ve diversified rather than deleted. And despite my
best intentions, I’ve continued to use my own novels to illustrate or
support my argument, though not necessarily because I believe
them to be particularly fine examples of how to write well. Some,
I’m sure, are actually quite good; some are less so. But every
example is merely an example – they’re always provisional – and
often the easiest way to explain myself is to point to a passage from
my own work. Besides which, as I know from the classroom, the
process of learning to write is an intensely personal process that
may best be encouraged through the example of personal
experience.
As with the exemplars, a mix of the familiar and less familiar may
be found in the exercises I use, many of which are my own
invention, some of which are not. A few were devised in good faith –
as if they were my own – only to surprise me in similar guise
elsewhere, evidently not my idea at all. But the provenance of
Creative Writing exercises is notoriously difficult to establish, and
while those that appear in a guidebook can take on the authority of
being the official or original version, often they are adaptations of
exercises that are already in general circulation, and with this in
mind I have taken care to acknowledge my sources where I am
aware of them, while of course offering my own (or rather, those I
believe to be my own) to the Creative Writing commons. You are
welcome to lay claim to them; you certainly wouldn’t be the first.
In writing this updated edition I have made any number of quite
minor amendments, many hardly worth mentioning, though I would
like to highlight one small change in emphasis. In the earlier edition,
I tended to use the word ‘discipline’ when discussing writerly habits,
whereas now my preference is ‘practice’.1 The connotations of these
two terms should suggest why. ‘Discipline’ invites the ogre into the
room – it sounds punitive, oppressive, regulatory – whereas
‘practice’ is kinder, more forgiving. Practice suggests provisionality:
one isn’t there yet, and that is okay; mistakes are allowed. And while
practice, like discipline, relies on routines, it suggests a happier state
of self-absorption and a bit more room for playfulness. For all that
writing can be hard work, the process of learning need not be
laborious; improvement need not rule out enjoyment.

1 I am grateful to Rosalind Brown for this, as I began to think differently after

reading her PhD thesis.
Finally, three other, minor points of explanation. If this book was
always intended to appeal as a university-level coursebook, it was
also, initially, designed to look like one, with all the apparatus of an
academic textbook, including footnoted citations. However, these
quickly became so much clutter on the page, and so I’ve limited
myself to a bibliography at the end of the book, listing all the works
I mention without giving page numbers for each and every
quotation. The footnotes that remain are there to allow me to
contradict or further explain myself. There’s another one at the foot
of this page.
English pronouns are always problematical and while it’s rightly no
longer acceptable to say ‘he’ when we mean ‘he or she’, or ‘his’
when we mean ‘his or her’, none of the alternatives strikes me as
particularly elegant: ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ can quickly become
unwieldy; ‘s/he’ is hard on the eye; and the use of the plural forms
‘they’ and ‘their’ when we mean the singular forms ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘his’ or
‘her’ can often sound ungrammatical, while sometimes also causing
confusion, suggesting the presence of more than one person when
there is just one. Of course, grammar is mutable, usage especially
so.2 Language changes over time, and not only have ‘they’ and
‘their’ been used for centuries as singular pronouns – usually when
the gender of the grammatical subject is unknown or unspecified –
in recent years it has also come to be accepted as the standard
pronoun for people who identify as non-binary. Even so – and with
the exception of that usage – the singular ‘they’ continues to ring
oddly on my ear, and my solution for the most part is to use ‘she’ on
some occasions and ‘he’ on others, more or less randomly, while
looking forward to the day when we can adopt the neater solution
suggested by the gender-fluid, anarchist utopia of Marge Piercy’s
feminist classic Woman on the Edge of Time, in which ‘per’ is the
standard singular pronoun, covering ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’, ‘she’, ‘hers’ and
‘her’.

2 My own understanding of grammar is mutable, too. Since I wrote the first

edition of this book, in which I stated categorically that the singular ‘they’ is
ungrammatical, I have come to appreciate the long history of its use in both
formal and informal contexts to mean ‘he’ or ‘she’, and its contemporary
acceptance by all the major dictionaries.
Finally, you may notice that the phrase ‘Creative Writing’ is
capitalised throughout, while the word ‘writing’ is not. This may be
splitting hairs, but I wish to preserve the sense that writing is what
writers do – and is an art – whereas Creative Writing is a subject of
study – a regulated set of educational activities that occurs in an
institution and results, usually, in a qualification. This isn’t to suggest
that the two can’t coincide, or that Creative Writing cannot be an
enjoyable, instructive, or personally improving set of activities. But it
is to suggest that writing need not occur in an institution, or in
response to a syllabus. The hope of the Creative Writing tutor,
anyway, is that the student will surpass the syllabus. And that,
ultimately, is the hope of this Creative Writing guidebook, that it will
enable you to surpass the instructions, and your own expectations,
and become a book about the art (and the craft and and the graft)
of writing.
1 Writers’ routines
DOI: 10.4324/9780429489303-2

I imagine most decorators will be interested in the brushes and

solvents that other decorators use, and where they get them, and on
what terms, and I expect they’ll be just as interested in each other’s
methods and how they get the best use out of those solvents and
brushes. They may even be curious about each other’s lives, how
they organise their weekends, and if they pay into a pension plan,
and whether they know a good osteopath. And no doubt the same
will go for plumbers, photographers, ceramicists, chefs, architects,
accountants….
I’m always interested in how other writers write, when and where
they do it, and what implements they use. I’m especially interested
in how they organise their lives. And being a writer, if I come across
some information I will squirrel it away – I’ll jot it down – though
being a fiction writer I won’t always remember it accurately. I might
well embellish it, or believe what I want to believe, and so the list
I’ve compiled of writers’ working routines might not be quite
accurate, however much it suits me to think it is.
Here is some of that list:

Ayòbámi Adébáyò writes on a laptop. On a bad day, she won’t

log off till early evening, though she may spend more time
online than meeting her word-count. On a good day, she’ll
forget the internet, lose all sense of time, and continue on
through the night.
Chinua Achebe preferred pen on paper, and preferred not to
have too strict a routine, though he liked to write every day.
Once he got going, he too could continue on through the night.
Martin Amis used to rent a flat as an office and work there in
the morning, then play tennis, then read all afternoon. Later he
worked in a ‘garden studio’.
Maya Angelou kept a sparsely furnished hotel room, where she
wrote from early morning till mid-afternoon. She slept at home,
which is also where she did her revisions.
Jeffrey Archer likes to line up a row of freshly sharpened pencils
and a team of editors.
Paul Auster writes with a fountain pen into notebooks of
squared paper, and endlessly revises. If he manages a page in a
day, he’s happy. After which he types up his ‘scratchings’ so he
can read them properly, and makes further corrections in pencil.
Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky and husband of the
novelist Jane Bowles, wrote longhand and claimed that 95% of
his writing was done in bed. Jane, he said, took a week to write
a page and the effort ‘cost her blood’.
Barbara Cartland dictated her novels from a chaise longue to a
secretary.
Roald Dahl lived on a farm and worked in a shed in his garden.
He sat in an armchair with a board on his lap and wrote from
ten until midday, then from four until six. In between times he
tended his animals.
Charles Dickens wrote, standing up, from nine till two every day.
After lunch he walked for three hours around London.
Louise Erdrich writes first drafts by hand, often working from
notebooks, and begins her revisions as she types up the drafts.
Further edits are made by hand on the printouts, ‘so they feel
repossessed’.
Ernest Hemingway wrote standing at a lectern, and often wrote
naked. He used a pencil, and only sat down to type when
writing dialogue. He began as soon after first light as his
hangover allowed.
Kazuo Ishiguro plans his books in his head, then sets aside a
month or so to write a rough draft, often working all day. He
has two desks. On one is a writing slope on which he produces
an almost illegible first draft. The other has a computer on
which he makes painstaking revisions. The computer isn’t
connected to the internet.
In common with Barbara Cartland, Henry James dictated his
later novels to a secretary.
James Joyce sometimes lounged on a sofa with his feet up and
wrote surrounded by domestic chaos.
Jamaica Kincaid professes to having no routine. She composes
initially in her head, and works mostly in bed. Once her
thoughts are written down she doesn’t return to revise them.
Stephen King keeps to a ‘clear cut’ routine. Mornings are his
prime writing time, accompanied by very loud music. In the
afternoon he writes letters and takes naps.
David Mitchell writes in a hut in his garden, and structures his
day around childcare. He writes initially on paper, then moves to
a laptop.
Haruki Murakami also works to an unvarying routine, the
repetition inducing ‘a form of mesmerism’. He begins very early
and writes till midday, then runs or swims very long distances.
Vladimir Nabokov also wrote from early in the morning, initially
in pencil onto filing cards, which he would then revise and
rearrange to produce his novels. He insisted on pencils tipped
with erasers. He didn’t go for long runs.
Joyce Carol Oates writes mainly in the morning, and mainly
before breakfast. If the work is going well she’ll delay breakfast
until two or three in the afternoon.
Edna O’Brien writes with a fountain pen into exercise books
from first thing in the morning until early afternoon, ‘in a kind of
trance’ as she describes it.
George Orwell wrote much of 1984 sitting up in bed with TB, a
pad in his lap.
Jyoti Patel can’t write in the mornings. She spends the day
gathering energy and ideas, and usually knows exactly what she
wants to write when she sits down in the evening. She
describes her whole day as ‘a warm-up act’.
The poet and novelist Michele Roberts writes novels directly
onto her computer, but sits in bed to write poems, in longhand,
her earlier drafts spread around her.
Philip Roth (like Dickens and Hemingway) wrote standing at a
lectern. His lectern was in a twelfth storey apartment with a
view of Manhattan, and his only other item of furniture was a
small bed, for catnapping.
Nikesh Shukla wrote much of his first novel on an iPad on his
knees as he commuted between Bristol and London, taking the
5.45 am bus in one direction, the 6 pm bus in the other.
Ali Smith, a prolific and prolifically inventive novelist, purports to
be ‘lazy’. The mornings are for admin. Her writing day begins in
mid-afternoon and continues into the evening and involves a lot
of staring into space.
Muriel Spark, who lived most of her writing life in Tuscany,
would only write in a particular brand of exercise book, which
she had sent to her from the Edinburgh stationers, James Thin.
John Steinbeck wrote his novels mainly in pencil, a page a day,
and didn’t correct or rewrite them until he had a complete draft.
Elizabeth Strout has breakfast, then clears the table to begin
writing. She writes in longhand, and when she has enough
scenes she pushes them around the table to find the right order.
Brandon Taylor writes when he writes, and doesn’t when he
doesn’t, and tries as best he can to live with the uncertainty.
William Trevor began writing at 7.20 each morning, and took
coffee at nine, then attempted one more hour before he
stopped for the day.
Edith Warton wrote in bed, tossing the pages to the floor for her
secretary to collect and type up.
Eudora Welty woke early and typed. Her structural revisions
were made using scissors and pins.
 John Edgar Wideman did the ‘brute work’ of early drafts in the
summer, using a pen or a pencil, and mostly wrote in the
mornings. He did his rewrites in the winter.
Virginia Woolf (like Dickens, Hemingway and Roth) sometimes
wrote standing at a lectern. More often (like Roald Dahl) she
wrote in an armchair with a board on her lap.

Here’s a ten-minute exercise:

1. When where what…

Consider your own writing routines and describe them under these
headings:
Where do you write?
When do you start?
Which days of the week?
How long do you write for?
What implements do you use?
What rules do you set yourself?
What excuses do you make?
If there’s no discernible pattern, that’s fine, for now. We’ll come back to this
later.

Of course there are exceptions – there will always be exceptions –

but what strikes me about my list is the number of writers for whom
writing happens best in the morning, often very early in the morning
(and sometimes without their even getting out of bed). Only a few
continue writing into the afternoon, and fewer still into the evening.
And then there are those, quite a few of them, for whom writing
begins when they are closest to the condition of sleep, or half-sleep:
those who write in a semi-slumber, or a semi-trance (or just while
reclining).
They seem to be suggesting that the ideal state for a writer – the
dream state, so to speak – is somewhere close to the state of
dreaming. And this is a theme that emerges in most of the books on
Creative Writing that I’m aware of, beginning with one of the classics
of the genre, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer, first published
in 1934. Inevitably it will crop up in this book too, in Chapter 3,
when I consider the role of the unconscious in relation to the
technique of automatic writing.
But besides the purely psychological argument for writing as soon
as you wake, it may be that there’s a sound practical reason for
starting early. The sooner you get going, the less likely you are to be
distracted by stuff, the intrusions and interruptions that other people
cause: the knocks on the door, the emails, the phonecalls, the
demands on your time and attention (and possibly your conscience)
that steadily accumulate throughout the day and can so fracture
your concentration and calm, and so drain you of energy, that there
can be no chance of writing later on.
Though perhaps it isn’t the intrusions and interruptions that other
people cause that are the issue. Possibly it’s your own tendency to
niggle away at yourself, forever remembering other things you ought
to be doing (and very often doing them). It could be that you are
your own worst enemy.
Many writers are.
One of the books on Creative Writing that I’ve turned to most
often is called Taking Reality by Surprise, edited by Susan Sellers
and published by The Women’s Press, and one of the exercises I’ve
most often used in my teaching is adapted from this book. The
original was devised by Nicky Edwards and is called ‘A Ten-Minute
Exercise on Time-Wasting’ and is designed to ‘speed the writer from
bed to computer, eliminating all forms of procrastination’. Over the
years my own version has evolved so that the wording is now very
different from hers, though the concept and structure remain the
same. (And this perhaps is an example of how we develop as
writers, and teachers: first imitating, even copying, then adapting,
and eventually – hopefully – originating.) You’ll need a pen and
paper. Here is my version of Nicky Edwards’s exercise:
2. Time-wasting
Imagine you are sitting at your desk and are ready to write. Let’s assume
there are no family or work demands, no other distractions. Now list all the
things you do to avoid starting. Tally up your marks in the style of a
magazinequestionnaire.
Fiddling: 1 point each
Stacking and squaring your papers. Cleaning the gunk from your keyboard.
Cleaning the gunk from your fingernails. Combing your hair. Combing your
beard. Adjusting the height of your chair. Adjusting the tilt of your chair…
Almost work-related distractions: 2 points each
Reading a page or two of a book to ‘get in the mood’. Rearranging the order of
the notes in a ring-binder. Counting (or re-counting) the words you’ve written
so far. Tidying, deleting and renaming the files and folders on your computer…
Stalling: 3 points each
Tidying your work-space. Re-reading your emails. Making lists of things to do
later. Re-drawing the schedule of work on your pinboard. Making more coffee.
Quickly checking your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram…
Dreaming: 3 points each
Re-reading yesterday’s work and not taking in a single word. More than ten
minutes staring at a window or a wall. More than five minutes with your eyes
closed or your head on the desk…
Skiving: 5 points each
Posting to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Replying to emails. Making
phonecalls. Doing the housework. Tackling minor repairs around the house.
Walking the dog to the postbox. Doing questionnaires like this one…
Absconding: 10 points each
Gardening. Decorating. Shopping. Sleeping. Visiting…
Score:
0–10 points: Completely abnormal. Try to relax.
11–20 points: A necessary amount of nest-circling. But beware of lapsing
once the writing has begun.
21–30 points: Perhaps you sat down too soon? Surely you’re doing things
now that were best done earlier?
 31+ points: Completely abnormal. Start worrying.

Initially and for some years I presented this exercise by way of

introduction to some stern, admonitory words on the dangers of
procrastination and the importance of self-discipline. The fact that
the majority of my students owned up to being in the ‘31+:
Completely abnormal’ category seemed only to confirm the need for
the exercise. The fact that I was also in the ‘31+: Completely
abnormal’ category, and that every single one of these displacement
activities applied equally to me, seemed only to confirm the need for
us all to be more vigilant, less dreamy, more focused, less dilatory.
I’ve since begun to realise that procrastination is not only not
‘completely abnormal’ but is an essential part of the process of
writing. I’ve begun to believe that we might benefit as much by
gazing at nothing as by staring at the screen, and that we need to
distract ourselves from our writing every bit as much as we need to
knuckle down to it.
John Keats famously characterised the writer (he actually said
‘Man of Achievement especially in literature’) as someone who is
‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason’, and while it may be stretching
it somewhat, here perhaps is another realm of uncertainty in which a
writer must dwell: whether or not to trust the impulse to delay or to
interrupt ourselves, whether to allow ourselves the licence to waste
time (always assuming it is, in fact, a ‘waste’).
There are limits of course – I once put my first novel Pig aside for
a couple of days and failed to return to it for nine months, and I still
allow whole days to disappear in a frenzy of file rearranging and
paper stacking (and emailing; especially emailing) – but often I think
we need certain periods of not-writing, or slow writing, so that
things can percolate up from the back of our minds and surprise us.
Sometimes I think we may even need to defer and delay for so long
that we reach such a pitch of anxiety that all our excuses metabolise
into nervous energy and eventually, finally, we have the impetus we
need to press on.
And energy is important. If you have a fit of the fidgets, or a
sudden urge to paint a ceiling or plant some seedlings, that may be
because you need to get some distance on the work so that you can
see it more clearly – or it may simply be that you need the exercise
(and the ceiling needs painting, the seedlings need planting).
Writing, unlike the other arts, involves little physical activity. Often it
requires tremendous physical restraint. Dancers, actors, painters,
potters, printmakers, photographers, sculptors and musicians all get
to move about a bit – and sometimes to suspend conscious thought,
relying instead on the body’s intelligence – but with writing the
energy is contained, held in; very often the body is clenched. Which
is tiring. Writing can be exhausting precisely because it requires so
much sitting still. And tired writers produce tired writing. Or none at
all.
Tired people produce tired writing, or none at all, and one
obvious reason why so many of the writers in my list do their writing
in the morning is because they have nothing better to do, being
writers (by which I mean successful, famous writers), whereas most
other people (including most other writers, including me) have to
organise their writing time around the need to earn a living, or bring
up a family, or care for their elderly parents, or complete a college
course, or even all four.
Clearly there are some writers who prefer to write in the evening.
The poet Philip Larkin wrote, if he wrote at all, only after he’d
completed a full day at work in the library at the University of Hull,
and then only after he’d cooked and eaten dinner and washed and
dried the dishes (he wrote with a fountain pen onto lined paper,
incidentally). For others, too, the best defence against the distracting
demands of real life and other people is to attend to those demands
first, to do the dishes or whatever else it may be, and then start the
writing. Possibly the option of rising at dawn in order to write before
work or family life begins is just too heroic or too daunting a
prospect: it’s the evening (however little remains of it) or nothing.
 Curiously, though, too much time may be even more of a problem
than too little.
This is especially true for beginning writers (of whatever age),
who won’t have the pressure of contractual deadlines, or the lure of
a readership curious to read what they’ve written (let alone the fear
of that readership browsing in a bookshop and choosing the latest
title by a rival writer instead). With certain familiar (and
exaggerated) exceptions – the Beats for instance; William Burroughs
and Jack Kerouac, let’s say1 – the lives of writers are generally quite
dull, often exceedingly dull. The writing requires it; that’s how the
writing gets done. And this can be a problem for the beginning
writer with too many options: almost anything can seem more
interesting and more enticing than writing.

1 Burroughs and Kerouac – heroes of the ‘writing while wasted’ idea – used to be
very popular with my undergraduate students, the boys in particular. But
Burroughs himself dismissed the usefulness of stimulants, sedatives and,
ultimately, hallucinogens to his writing. They were, he said in an interview with
The Paris Review, ‘absolutely contraindicated for creative work’. The example of
burnt-out, alcoholic Kerouac perhaps proves his point. Burroughs’ own output
perhaps doesn’t.
Conversely, sometimes nothing can seem quite so important as
writing, to the extent that the actual, practical sitting down and
doing it becomes fraught with anxiety. Unless the circumstances
appear in some way auspicious, or we feel in some way inspired –
and the writing in some way guaranteed to succeed – then we dare
not begin.
A little of both of these attitudes afflicted me in the writing of Pig.
I know from an old diary that the first twelve pages took me seven
months to complete, and that it then took me a further four years to
get as far as page 124, just past half-way. I was a young man
drifting along, periodically unemployed, only ever in low-paid, part-
time, often menial work, and with no particular ambitions. I rarely
made time in my day for writing, and had next-to-no belief in myself
as a writer or in my book as a publishable novel. Yet despite this, I
was also profoundly attached to the idea of writing and of ‘being’ a
writer and of the importance of writing well. The tension between
these contradictory attitudes meant that I continually delayed and
deferred sitting down with my book until my stars were aligned, my
yin-yang in harmony, my in-tray empty, the dishes all done.
The second half of Pig was written in just over a year, and two
things helped me to accelerate. The first was accepting that I did in
fact have a plausibly publishable book, or at least half of one, which
encouraged me to believe I could write the other half. The second
was acquiring both a proper, full-time job (my first) and a baby
daughter (ditto). My working days began and ended with an almost
two-hour commute across Glasgow by bus, tube and overground
train; my weekends were organised around Rose. Suddenly I
seemed to have notime whatsoever to write, and this, contrarily,
made the urge and determination to write all the more pressing.
Somewhat belatedly I realised I needed to designate a time –
however limited, or hemmed about with other concerns – that was
my writing time, and that this needed to be consistent and protected
(not least from my own tendency towards self-sabotage). And so I
began to write most evenings between half-nine and midnight, after
Rose was asleep and – interestingly (to me at least) – after I’d had a
short sleep myself, which had an effect similar to that of a wiper on
a rain-spattered windscreen: my catnap cleared away the clutter of
the day, erased the accumulated aggravations, and allowed me to
begin a little closer, perhaps, to the state of dreaming.
It helped for me that my partner was (and is) also a writer. As far
as we could, we shared the chores and childcare equally, took turns
on our only computer, and worked as each other’s editor and
principal reader.2 But not everyone is so fortunate; in fact, quite
often the opposite. Those nearest to us can be the biggest obstacle
to our writing, since our writing requires so much of our attention,
our energy and time, and this will frequently provoke hostility or
jealousy, whether openly expressed, or disguised in the form of
indifference or a consistent lack of encouragement.
2 Lynne would give a differently slanted account of this time, emphasising post-
natal exhaustion and the burden of breastfeeding. As I became more productive,
she became less so.
Alternatively, those nearest to us might be our parents, who can
cherish quite different ambitions for us than our own, seeing in
writing a particularly hazardous, insecure and uncertain career
choice, perhaps even viewing it as a prolongation of adolescence, a
wilful or dreamy refusal to accept adult responsibility (both of which
views may be quite accurate).
Or the obstacle can be our children. Cyril Connolly famously wrote
in Enemies of Promise that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good
art than the pram in the hall’, and while some will find in the birth of
a child a spur to their writing (as I did), and some will claim (or
cheerfully complain) that each of their children represents a book
that will never be written, others may struggle even to get going,
since the pram is already there, the soft toys strewn about the floor,
the nappies dripping in the kitchen.3

3 J.G. Ballard, a brilliant and prolific writer, brought up three children after the
early death of his wife, and wrote this in his autobiography Miracles of Life:

I kept up a steady output of novels and short story collections, largely

because I spent most of my time at home. A short story, or a chapter of a
novel, would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up
the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter. I am certain that my fiction
is all the better for that. My greatest ally was the pram in the hall.

All of us are hindered in some way, but what seems a hindrance

to one writer may well be a help to another. I know of one novelist,
for instance, who claims to work best in the evenings and only after
her second glass of wine; yet for most of us even one glass may be
too many. On one Arvon Foundation course I taught, there was a
student who could only write to music and had brought along a pair
of plate-sized earphones to plug into his phone. His room-mate,
meanwhile, had packed a pair of industrial ear-muffs, since even
birdsong would derange him.
 Whatever they may be, it can be useful to itemise those things we
find a hindrance to our writing, as well as those things we find
helpful. The following exercise is called ‘Friends and Foes’ and is my
version of an exercise I first encountered on that same Arvon
course. It appears in what mightbe its original form in Louise
Doughty’s cheerful guidebook A Novel in a Year (where it’s called
‘Allies and Enemies’) and in David Morley’s The Cambridge
Introduction to Creative Writing (where it’s called ‘Enemies and
Allies’):

3. Friends and foes

Take two sheets of paper and give one the heading ‘Friends’ and the other
‘Foes’.
Under ‘Friends’ make a list of all the things that help you in your writing.
Some of these may be people (a supportive partner, perhaps) or the memory
of people (a grandparent who always made you feel valued, let’s say) or
maybe even an animal (the cat in your lap). Some might be objects (a
particular pen, the ergonomic chair that means you no longer get backache)
or surroundings (this view of your garden, the calm you find in the back
bedroom). Other ‘friends’ might include the coffee you drink in the morning, or
the wine you drink in the evening, or your twenty roll-ups a day, or your gunk-
cleaning routine, or the hour you spend at the gym, or the cut-and-paste
facility on your PC, or the favourite novels you turn to for guidance. And then
there are the thoughts about yourself and your writing that console or inspire
or encourage you, which may well be your best friends of all.
Under ‘Foes’ make a list of all the things that hinder you in your writing.
Some of these may be people (an unsupportive partner, perhaps) or the
memory of people (the parent who is always so critical, let’s say) or maybe
even an animal (the cat that keeps pestering to sit in your lap). Some can be
objects (the keyboard that gives you RSI, the uncomfortable chair that causes
your backache) or surroundings (this dismal view of the bins in the shared
courtyard, the constant noise from upstairs). Other foes might be the wine you
drink in the evening, or the hangover you wake to each morning, or your
constant trips to the kitchen, or your email addiction, or your migraine
affliction, or the prizewinning novels you keep comparing your own to. And of
course there are the thoughts about yourself and your writing that defeat or
depress or discourage you, which can be absolutely your worst foes of all.
 The point here is not to cancel out each of your friends with a
foe, or to challenge each foe with a friend, but to try to be clear
about what enables or inhibits you, and to think about ways in which
you might foster the thoughts and circumstances that assist you,
while addressing or simply acknowledging the conditions that hinder
you, whether they be practical, personal or psychological.
It could be that you only have an hour a day of writing in you,
and that any more time at the desk will simply not be productive,
and may even be counter-productive. Alternatively, you may be
someone who needs to spend long hours spooling words, any words,
until finally you hit the seam and can write your best work. People
differ, both in personality and personal circumstances. Some things
can’t be changed. Others can’t be changed easily. But recognition
can be a necessary first step towards finding the writing routine that
best suits you.
It could be, for instance, that starting early is a bargain you need
to strike with yourself: if you can get the writing done by mid-
afternoon, or by lunchtime, or by breakfast, the day will still be long,
so no other chore need be left undone, niggling away at the back of
your mind.
Or it may be that all your other chores and obligations must be
dealt with first: if you can finish your essay, or get the children to
bed, or complete your shift at work, then whatever time remains
need not be overshadowed or interrupted by those other concerns.
And while it would not be a good idea to trust the urge to daydream,
fidget or paint ceilings to such an extent that no writing gets done at
all, it may be useful to accommodate these distractions as a
necessary precursor to writing, so that they are acknowledged as a
part of the process and serve to create the mental space in which
the writing can happen.
And ultimately it is a mental space you need to create, some inner
place you can retreat to as way of announcing to yourself ‘I am a
writer’ – or if that seems too grandiose or presumptuous, then ‘I am
writing’. You need to create this space, and you need to devise a
schedule, a regular and consistent routine, that will take you there.
This is partly so that you don’t come to depend upon the gift of
inspiration, which may strike when you’re least ready, or may never
strike, or may in fact require you to be fully immersed in the practice
of writing before it can find you. But mainly it’s because the
unpredictability of writing – the sense of never knowing for sure
what will come out today – may depend on all other distractions
being eliminated.
As I’ll explore in Chapters 4 and 10, the measure of successful
writing is very often the extent to which it is able surprise us – as
writers and readers – by reawakening perceptions made dull by
habit and familiarity. And this ability to ‘make strange’ or
‘defamiliarise’ very often depends, paradoxically, on our writing lives
being premised on habit, on the dullness of familiar routines.
Now attempt again our first exercise, but this time describe the
routine you intend to work to from now on:

4. What where when…

Think about your ideal writing routine. Then modify it so it becomes more
realistic. Now describe it under these headings:
Where will you write?
When will you start?
Which days of the week?
How long will you write for?
What implements will you use?
What rules will you set yourself?
What excuses are you most determined not to make?

Whatever routine you set for yourself, it is inevitable that you will
at times struggle. You should anticipate that you will occasionally
fail. Such is the nature of writing. But you can reduce the chances of
failure by being realistic about the many other demands on your
time and your energies, and if it seems that you may only have a
short period each day for writing – thirty minutes before breakfast,
let’s say; perhaps an hour before bedtime – then that time is fine. It
is better to know what you have, and to adapt to it, than to
condemn yourself to the frustration of not being able to meet any
more challenging targets. And even thirty minutes may be enough, if
you are clear about what can be achieved. Several of the exercises
in the next two chapters are designed for generating material in
short bursts of activity, before the demons of self-doubt can settle in.
Often this will be material that can be developed later into longer
works. But the exercises themselves can become an essential, on-
going feature of your writing practice, something you do as a matter
of routine, which is after all what it means to ‘be’ a writer. Writers
write – regularly, habitually and routinely.
2 Write about what you know
Observational journals
DOI: 10.4324/9780429489303-3

Despite the necessity of sitting still for long periods (or of standing,
in the case of Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth and
Virginia Woolf) writing has one definite advantage over other,
physically more expressive art forms: it requires the barest minimum
of tools and materials, and can be accommodated to the smallest of
working environments. A pen and paper and something to lean on
will do.
Of course, whatever the art-form, a good deal of imagination is
also required, and the application of that imagination to some raw
material, whether it be the dancer’s body, the ceramicist’s clay, the
painter’s acrylics, or the conceptualist’s dead shark and
formaldehyde. In the case of the writer, the raw material is
language, which is to say words, and the writer’s first problem is
always to find enough words – or, to put that the other way round,
to choose from among the all-too-many possible words that are out
there. Too much choice can be just as disabling as none. Finding the
exact words can be a torturous business.
In this respect a dictionary will be one helpful addition to the
writer’s minimal toolkit, whereas a thesaurus may not be.
Like the Bible to the believer, a dictionary is a constant source of
comfort and security, a dependable guide and confirmation in which
every word has an origin and a history as well as an apparently
stable identity – a consistent spelling and function and a reliable
meaning or range of alternative meanings.1 A dictionary defines and
delimits, which makes precision possible, and as a writer you will be
as committed to precision – to exactness and clarity – as you are
interested in the nature of the words you use: where they come
from, what they can do, and where you can take them.

1 Up to a point anyway: unlike the Bible, a dictionary will need continual revision
since the stability of the language is only ever relative – some words become
fossils, some simply archaic, others take on new meanings, or shed old ones. New
words are invented.
However, as a writer you will also be acutely aware of how words
can fail you. The more you engage with the language the more you
will come to suspect that its true nature is to be inconsistent and
unreliable: meaning often depends on context; ambiguity creeps in;
words won’t say what you want them to say; they clang when you
want them to chime; sometimes they slip away from you.2

2 The unreliability of language is something you may want to explore, of course;

eventually you may wish to exploit the possibilities of imprecision, the
suggestiveness of ambiguity. But how to be imprecise without being obscure, how
to be ambiguous without becoming confusing? Perhaps even vagueness requires
exactness. I’ll come back to this in Chapter 11.
We’ve all had the experience of the word on the tip of our tongue
for instance, and if we are writing (as opposed to talking) we’ll often
reach for a thesaurus, just as I did in the Introduction to this book
when I wanted to use the word ‘provenance’. Unfortunately, just as it
usually happens, I went through my thesaurus from possibility to
possibility – via many impossibilities – and failed to find the exact
word I wanted. In the end I asked my wife.
In this respect a thesaurus is the epitome of what language is like
– so many words, each defined by what it is not, the exact definition
never quite certain, the exact word forever elusive…. Having had
one since I was at school, I haven’t yet summoned the courage to
discard my own thesaurus, though I use it less and less. I’m not sure
I would recommend you acquire one (though you might bookmark
an online version just in case).3
3 Then again, Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated makes good
comic use of the possibilities of the thesaurus. One of its narrators, Alex Perchov,
is a Ukrainian translator whose voice is composed of a stream of bad thesaurus
choices: he doesn’t spend money but ‘disseminates currency’; he doesn’t sit but
‘roosts’, doesn’t explain but ‘illuminates’, doesn’t sign his letters sincerely but
‘guilelessly’, etc. A quite different novel that explores the comedy (and poignancy)
of bad language choices is Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for
Lovers, which begins with a handwritten note ‘Sorry of my english’ and makes a
virtue of 24-year-old Zhuang’s limited grasp of English grammar, idioms and
vocabulary. The novel charts a year in her life in London, and as she becomes
more adept in the language so too does she become more sophisticated in her
understanding of the complexities of human relationships, which aren’t ultimately
reducible to linguistic or cultural difference.
I would however recommend you acquire a notebook, or several.
Neither the dictionary nor the thesaurus quite qualifies as source
of material for the writer of fiction (though either could be employed
as a prompt to the kind of automatic writing exercises I describe in
Chapter 3). Your source, very often, will be your own experience and
your awareness of the world around you – at least initially – and one
way in which you can begin to generate your own material is to keep
a notebook, or a series of notebooks.
Here you can record your observations – your eavesdroppings and
noticings – and so accumulate a bank of words and phrases,
descriptive paragraphs and character sketches, snatches of dialogue
and (perhaps) quotations from other writers that will act as a kind of
deposit account of language from which you can later make
withdrawals to adapt or incorporate into your work-in-progress, or to
form the basis from which you can begin to build a new work.
This writerly practice of observing and notetaking is a crucial
means of fixing experience in words (particular words, in a particular
order) and therefore of fixing those words in your mind. And when
you are feeling especially impoverished – lacking ideas, struggling
for words – your bank of phrases and paragraphs can be what
sustains you. The potential danger in this is that you may come to
depend too much on your notebooks and so become overly shy of
invention, of ‘simply’ making it up. This possible pitfall, and the
benefits of notetaking, are nicely described by W. Somerset
Maugham in A Writer’s Notebook:

I forget who it was who said that every author should keep a
notebook, but should take care never to refer to it. If you
understand this properly, I think there is truth in it. By making a
note of something that strikes you, you separate it from the
incessant stream of impressions that crowd across the mental
eye, and perhaps fix it in your memory. All of us have had good
ideas or vivid sensations that we thought would one day come
in useful, but which, because we were too lazy to write them
down, have entirely escaped us. When you know you are going
to make a note of something, you look at it more attentively
than you otherwise would, and in the process of doing so the
words are borne in upon you that will give it its private place in
reality. The danger of using notes is that you may find yourself
inclined to rely on them, and so lose the even and natural flow
of your writing which comes from allowing the unconscious that
full activity which is somewhat pompously known as inspiration.

Having kept notebooks for many years, and having drawn on them
heavily for at least one novel – Common Ground – and somewhat
less heavily for my other books, I’m inclined to disagree with the
idea that you should take care never to refer to your notebooks. In
fact, just the opposite: I trawl through mine regularly, though I’m
often acutely aware of how the pre-prepared phrase might work
against the ‘even and natural flow’ of what I’ve already written. It’s
encouraging therefore to find a contemporary novelist as significant
as Richard Ford – a writer of richly detailed, absorbing depictions of
what he calls ‘the normal applauseless life of us all’ – admitting in an
interview to generating new work in just the way I am advocating
here:

I’m a noticer and a prolific taker of notes. If I see something, I

try to write it down because I know I’ll forget it otherwise. So
when I start a story, while I may not have the story itself, I do
 have a collation of raw materials – details written in words,
sentences that I’ve heard over time and thought were
interesting, descriptions of people, memories of my own. That’s
the raw material for what will become a story.

Ford isn’t alone, of course; far from it. Among others, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie describes herself as ‘an unrepentant eavesdropper and
a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. I ask
questions. I watch the world’, while Louise Erdrich speaks of having
always kept notebooks – indeed of having an ‘obsessive devotion’ to
them – and of returning to them frequently for her own raw
material: ‘I go back to them over and over. They are my compost
pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in and after a number of years I’ll get a
handful of earth’.4

4 The Adiche quote comes from an essay in the Guardian in 2013. Erdrich is
speaking in an interview with The Paris Review. The Ford quote comes from a
collection of interviews edited by James Roberts called Writers on Writing.
A more didactic version of Somerset Maugham’s advice is to be
found in a short story by the Canadian writer Norman Levine. ‘Tricks’
describes a residential writing course very similar to those run by the
Arvon Foundation, and the speaker here is one of the tutors:

Take things from life,’ Adolphe said. ‘Bad experience is better

than no experience. Invent as little as possible. You are
inventing the piece the way you use words and the way you are
telling it. Wherever you go you will notice things.

Adolphe is a faded poet, and despite his name – ‘like Hitler but with
an e’ – he isn’t as dictatorial as this may make him sound; his
dogmatism in fact disguises a deep ambivalence about his authority
as a teacher and about the nature of literary fame (as well as a
profound sadness about life). However, even if he were a mini-Hitler,
I suspect I would still find myself agreeing with him here, both with
the somewhat contentious suggestion that you should invent as little
as possible (though only initially, and only up to a point) and with
the more straightforward notion that wherever you go you will notice
things.
This latter idea does require one small qualification, though:
wherever you go you will notice things, but only if you have trained
yourself in the habit of noticing and of recording what you have
noticed. Lydia Davis encapsulates this thought in her essay ‘Thirty
Recommendations for Good Writing Habits’:

Take notes regularly. This will sharpen both your powers of

observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback
loop is established: through the habit of taking notes, you will
inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have
more to note down.

A useful analogy might be the small fortune that my daughter and I

have accrued in lost coins over the years. When Rose was much
younger there was a fashion among the boys who hung around our
local shops to throw away their small change, what they called their
‘shrapnel’. One day we decided we would gather up this discarded
money, and gradually, as the weeks went by, we began to notice
coins outside other shops too, and along kerbsides, on buses, in
cafes, wherever we happened to go. We collected them all, and by
the end of the year we’d amassed £27.55, which seemed so large a
windfall we decided to carry on for another year, then another, and
another, until we found we could not stop.
The boys may no longer discard their shrapnel, and Rose may no
longer live at home, but people continue to lose their money and we
continue to pick it up whenever we see it.5 Each time she visits,
Rose unloads a handful of coins into our jam-jar, and for the last
several years our total has averaged around £80, the record being
£122.14 in 2018. Usually we find coppers and silver, but there are
pound coins too, and sometimes notes. And what has happened, I
believe, is that we have become uncommonly attuned to something
most people would overlook: because we’ve schooled ourselves in
the habit of looking, we now notice lost money wherever we go; we
can’t help it.

5 This at least was the case until the Covid-19 pandemic, when most people
carried cards instead of cash, and didn’t go out so much. Our totals in 2020 and
2021 were £7.76 and £11.52 respectively.
Similarly, once you get into the habit of keeping notebooks, you
will begin to notice noteworthy things; you will become uncommonly
attuned to all manner of things you might not normally see, and this
noticing will become ingrained, almost a reflex.
In an essay called ‘The Art of Fiction’, published in 1884, Henry
James imagined saying to a novice writer, ‘Write from experience,
and experience only’, to which he then added, ‘Try to be one of the
people on whom nothing is lost!’
This has since become something of a slogan in Creative Writing
teaching – echoed by Adolphe with an e – but is nonetheless the
best of advice, as useful now as it was then, and the first step to
becoming a person on whom nothing is lost is to acquire the habit of
collecting (that is, noticing, recording, and saving in your notebook)
the particulars of everyday experience.
There are two ways of going about this. The first is to keep a
general, all-encompassing observational journal. The second, which
has been my own habit, is to keep specific journals for specific
periods of time on specific themes. But the first approach first:

5. Keeping an observational journal

You will need a smartphone or a notebook compact enough to take with
you wherever you go. If you’re using a notebook it shouldn’t be something too
precious (leather-bound with premium-grade paper, let’s say) as that might
make you overly precious about what you put in it (you may feel that every
sentence has to be leather-bound and premium-grade too). The purpose of
the notetaking is to gather up raw material. Rawness is fine. Any old notepad
will do.
Now go and sit somewhere public. If I were teaching a university class, at
this point I would open the door and send the students away for a while – to
 the campus coffee bar, the steps overlooking the plaza, the pub, the library, or
simply to wander the walkways and corridors. I would ask them to be extra-
attentive to their surroundings, and to jot down whatever strikes them as
interesting. At the appointed time, everyone should return to the seminar
room prepared to read out some of their findings to the rest of the group.
What might those findings be? What might you record in your notebook as
you sit in your chosen place? Remember that this is an observational journal,
an objective record of things seen and heard, rather than a place to express
your hopes and fears, explore your emotions, or even to set down your
memories. In this notebook you might:

– record an overheard conversation, perhaps only a snatch, perhaps a

mere phrase, possibly the entire exchange;
– record your own conversation with someone, not necessarily a friend,
and not necessarily very long;
– describe an unusual or puzzling scene, something glimpsed through a
window perhaps, something whose meaning isn’t necessarily obvious;
– describe in detail an incident whose meaning may seem obvious, but
which you might not normally observe so closely;
– make a note of interesting, intriguing or amusing shop names, graffiti,
public notices, newspaper headlines, etc.;
– describe the weather, the way the light falls, the way the rain falls;
– jot down the details of something you might not normally notice, or
might not normally need to find the words for: the design of things, the
decay of things;
– make a sketch in words of someone observed on a bus, in a cafe or a
bar, walking down the street, sitting in the park, etc., and perhaps
speculate on their character, their story.

And having begun, having made your first entry, you should keep going. Make
this a practice you continue indefinitely, replacing one notebook with another,
and then another, and another. Attempt to weave your findings into your
current work-in-progress.

For the purposes of an exercise that comes later in this book, you
should be especially observant of strangers in public places while
keeping this journal. In addition, it might be useful if you gathered
other ‘found’ material in the form of magazine photographs and
newspaper clippings, whether paper copy pasted to actual
scrapbooks with glue (such as I used to do), or digital copy sourced
online and cut-and-pasted to a dedicated folder on your computer
(such as I tend to do now). These will not only be useful for later
exercises, but the clippings in particular can be an excellent starting
point for generating stories.

6. Keeping a scrapbook
Collect photographs of interesting people from magazines or the internet,
but avoid celebrities: you don’t want anyone whose face is instantly
recognisable or whose ‘character’ may already be known to you. Newspaper
supplements tend to be better for this, as they usually depict their subjects in
natural poses, as themselves. Fashion glossies are all about the image, which
makes the personality less easy to access.
Collect pictures of interesting locations, too – both interior and exterior.
Empty locations are particularly useful, full of potential, a sense of ‘something
might happen’. Crowd scenes can have a similar effect, the more crowded the
better.
Look out for human interest stories in newspapers, whether tragic or comic,
distressing or funny. The local evening paper is often best for this: ordinary
people surprised by something slightly out of the ordinary.
We’ll return to this material in later chapters.

In one obvious sense there’s an artificiality to the way I’ve

described the observational journal exercise. In reality it would be
impractical to banish personal, subjective material to another
notebook, or to carry around different notebooks for different
purposes. Very often the writer’s notebook is a scrappy, all-inclusive
compendium of observations, reflections, quotations, other people’s
book recommendations, memos-to-self, names and addresses,
shopping lists, to-do lists, et cetera.
The crucial point here, however, is to emphasise the importance
of looking outwards rather than inwards, and to stress that writing
from experience is very often as much a matter of observation as it
is of introspection.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ein Schüler Fusts oder Schöffers gewesen. Bei ihm erschien um
1470 die erste Ausgabe von Thomas a Kempis' „Vier Bücher von der
Nachfolge Christi“, ein Buch, welches nächst der Bibel am
häufigsten aufgelegt worden ist. Eine grosse Anzahl deutscher
Bücher druckte Johann Bämler (1472-1492). Anton Sorg (1475-
1498) gab das erste Wappenbuch heraus, enthaltend die Wappen
aller bei dem Konzil von Constanz anwesenden Herren. Einen
hochberühmten Namen erwarb sich der Augsburger Erhard
Ratdolt, ein fahrender Buchdrucker, dessen Namen mit der
venetianischen Buchdruckergeschichte rühmlichst verknüpft ist. Am
meisten glänzt Hans Schönsperger der Ältere (1481-1523).
Über diesen sowie über Ratdolt wird später ausführlicher zu
sprechen sein.

Der Vater der Typographie NÜRNBERGS[12]

Nürnberg.
ist Johann Sensenschmid (1473-1478), ein
durch Gelehrsamkeit und Korrektheit seiner Antonius Ko-
Druckwerke bekannter Buchdrucker, der 1478 berger.
nach Bamberg zog. Auch der berühmte Astronom
Joh. Regiomontanus (Joh. Müller aus Königsberg) errichtete in
Nürnberg eine Druckerei und druckte deutsche und lateinische
Kalender. Des grössten Namens als Buchdrucker und Buchhändler
erfreute sich aber Antonius Koberger[13] (1473-1513). Er arbeitete
mit 24 Pressen und beschäftigte über 100 Gesellen. Man kennt 220
aus seinen Pressen hervorgegangene Werke, beinahe alle in Folio-
Format von bedeutendem Umfange, von grosser Korrektheit und
Eleganz. Allein 19 Bibeln druckte er, darunter eine in deutscher
Sprache mit gothischen Typen und mit denselben Holzschnitten
ausgestattet, die bereits in Köln zu der niederdeutschen Bibel von
1480 verwendet waren.
 Die Ausführung befriedigte jedoch Koberger
nicht und gab ihm Veranlassung, Schritte zu thun, Der Schatzbe-
um künftig auf heimischem Boden stehen zu halter.
können. Wie rasch dies gelang, zeigt der 1491
erschienene „Schatzbehalter des Reichtums des ewigen Heils“. Die
Holzschnitte sind zwar ungleich, je nach Fertigkeit der
Holzschneider, aber die Zeichnungen, die unzweifelhaft Michel
Wohlgemut angehören, sind durchweg mit Geschmack und
künstlerischem Sinn ausgeführt, zugleich unter Innehaltung der
Grenzen, welche die noch nicht vollendete Technik des
Holzschnittes verlangte.

Das 1493 sowohl in einer deutschen, wie in

Schedels
einer lateinischen Ausgabe erschienene „Buch Chronik.
der Chroniken und Geschichten“ des Doktor
Hartmann Schedel ist als illustriertes Werk eins der merkwürdigsten
Presserzeugnisse des xv. Jahrhunderts. Da ein Übereinkommen mit
Wohlgemut und Wilh. Pleydenwurf über die Lieferung der mehr als
2000 in dem Buch enthaltenen Illustrationen (von den zweimal und
öfter vorkommenden abgesehen) erst 1491 getroffen wurde, so sieht
man, dass über bedeutende sowohl xylographische wie
typographische Kräfte verfügt wurde. Zum Schluss des Werkes
werden die angesehenen Nürnberger Bürger Sebald Schreyer und
Sebastian Kammermaister als um die Förderung des Werkes
verdient erwähnt, ohne dass jedoch über die Art und Weise etwas
verlautet, vielleicht haben sie als reiche Kunstkenner die Kosten der
Illustrationen getragen.

Bei dem Druck der „Reformation der Stadt Nürnberg“ (1475)

wendete Koberger eine verschönerte halbgothische Schrift an,
welche der nachherigen Fraktur sehr nahe stand und die später
auch bei dem grossen Druckwerke „Leben der Heiligen“ (1488)
benutzt wurde.

Die Wirksamkeit Kobergers als Verleger war

Kobergers grosse
eine so grosse — sein Katalog zählt allein 33 Thätigkeit.
Bibeln auf —, dass die Kräfte der eigenen
bedeutenden Offizin zur Herstellung aller Werke nicht zulangten und
öfters andere Offizinen in Anspruch genommen werden mussten,
namentlich die von Johannes Ammerbach in Basel. Aus Kobergers
Briefwechsel[14] mit diesem zeigt sichs, wie umsichtig er für alles
besorgt war, und mit Recht allgemein den Ruf eines ungemein
fleissigen, ordnungsliebenden und pünktlichen Mannes genoss.

Selbst bei dieser grossen Verlagsthätigkeit ruhte Koberger nicht.

Er trieb zugleich einen ausgedehnten Sortimentshandel, hatte an
mehreren Orten Filialen und Agenten, ja es scheint sogar, als habe
er sich auch mit anderen als buchhändlerischen Geschäften befasst.
Diese seine Thätigkeit brachte ihm Ansehen und goldene Früchte.
Auch im häuslichen Leben war er gesegnet und hatte von seinen
zwei Frauen mehr als zwanzig Kinder, von denen einige ebenfalls
eine bedeutende geschäftliche Wirksamkeit entfalteten. Er starb im
J. 1513.

In BAMBERG[15] wirkte Albrecht Pfister

Bamberg.
(geb. um 1420; gest. um 1470), von vielen für Albr. Pfister.
einen selbständigen Erfinder der
Buchdruckerkunst und den Drucker der 36zeiligen Bibel gehalten.
Als Beweis wird die Identität der Typen dieses Werkes mit denen
des Bonerschen „Fabelbuches“ (1461), der „vier Historien“ (1462),
sowie des „Belial“, welche Pfisters Namen tragen, angeführt.
Dagegen spricht entschieden die typographisch sehr niedrig
stehende Ausführung sämtlicher Druckwerke Pfisters. Wer die
36zeilige Bibel gedruckt hat, wird schwerlich als Künstler so tief
sinken. Die Typen kann Pfister ja recht wohl von Gutenberg
erworben haben.

Das Bonersche Fabelbuch (1461) enthält 88 sehr geringe

Holzschnitte und wurde früher für das erste deutsche illustrierte
Buch[16] gehalten. Die Priorität muss jedoch den: „Sieben Freuden
Mariä“ und der „Leidensgeschichte Jesu“ (1450-1460) eingeräumt
werden, die in künstlerischer Beziehung über dem Fabelbuch
stehen. Ob letztere beiden Erzeugnisse der Pfisterschen Presse
angehören, lässt sich nicht ermitteln. Unter diesen bleiben noch zu
erwähnen: eine „Armenbibel“ deutsch (wahrscheinlich 1462), sowie
dasselbe Werk lateinisch. Es enthält 17 Blätter in Folio mit 170
Holzschnitten. Mutmasslich hat Pfister keinen bleibenden Aufenthalt
in Bamberg gehabt, denn in neunzehn Jahren, bis 1481, ist kein aus
Bamberger Pressen hervorgegangenes Werk bekannt.

Der von Nürnberg nach Bamberg

Johann Sensen-
übergesiedelte Johann Sensenschmid (1482- schmid.
1490) lieferte ein prachtvolles Missale ordinis S.
Benedicti und später im Verein mit Heinrich Petzensteiner (bis
1491) das Missale ecclesiæ Ratisponensis, welches so grossen
Beifall fand, dass der Drucker desselben mit vielen ähnlichen
Aufträgen beehrt wurde.

In WIEN[17] stand die 1365 begründete

Wien.
Universität in voller Blüte und der Kaiser Friedrich
iii. war der Buchdruckerkunst wohl gewogen. Er
hatte, wie erwähnt, Joh. Mentel in den Adelstand erhoben und die
Kunst durch ihre und ihrer Verwandten Aufnahme in seinen und des
Reiches Schutz und durch Verleihung eines Wappens[18] geehrt. Zu
verwundern bleibt es umsomehr, dass erst 1482 in Wien gedruckt
wurde. Allerdings waren die Zeiten nicht gerade die günstigsten. Im
Jahre 1481 führte Matthias Corvinus von Ungarn zum drittenmale
seine Heere nach Österreich; 1482 brach die Pest in Wien aus; 1485
zog Matth. Corvinus siegreich dort ein und behauptete seine
Herrschaft bis 1490.

Aus dem Jahre 1482 stammen die ersten unbedeutenden

Druckerzeugnisse Wiens ohne Namen und Datum. Bis zum Jahre
1492 zeigt sich keine weitere Spur vom Druck und erst von da ab
kann man eigentlich von einer Buchdruckerkunst in Wien reden.

In dem zuletzt genannten Jahre druckte Joh.

J. Winterburger.
Winterburger, aus Winterburg bei Kreuznach,
A. Flacci: Persij Satire. Weder dieser Druck, noch
die 1492 gedruckte Leichenrede Bernh. Pergers auf den Kaiser
Friedrich iii. trägt die Firma Winterburgers und nur die Typen
gestatten den Schluss, dass sie von ihm ausgeführt wurden. Da
seine Druckerei damals eine sehr gut eingerichtete war, so ist es
nicht unmöglich, dass sie schon 1482 bestand und dass die
Drucksachen aus jener Zeit von ihm stammen, doch sind keine
Beweise dafür vorhanden, und die lange Pause wäre nicht ganz
leicht zu erklären. Erst 1493 kommt sein Name vor, zum erstenmale
auf dem Ceremoniell zu dem „begencknus Kaiserlicher Maistat“,
Friedrich iii. Kaiser Maximilian begünstigte Winterburger sehr und
verlieh ihm die Führung des kaiserlichen Adlers[19]. Er verdiente
aber auch jede Aufmunterung, denn er druckte kostbare Werke und
förderte die Arbeiten nicht allein der Wiener Gelehrten. Er starb im
hohen Alter (1519), in demselben Jahre wie sein Gönner, der Kaiser.
 In den West- und Nordmarken des
Deutschen Reiches ist es ganz besonders KÖLN, Köln.
das in den ersten Zeiten der Kunst die Ulrich Zell.
Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zieht. Seine Lage
machte es zum Mittelpunkte der Verbreitung des Buchdrucks im
Norden Deutschlands und überhaupt Europas, und von dort gehen
auch viele der typographischen Verbesserungen aus, z. B. die
Anwendung der Signaturen, der Pagination, des eigentlichen
Buchtitels und der Kolumnentitel, der kleinern Schriften und
Formate. Viele der Buchdrucker, die mit Ruhm anderswo arbeiteten,
erhielten ihre typographische Bildung in Köln. Schon im frühesten
Mittelalter war es ein Sitz der Wissenschaft und der Kunst, und seine
1388 gegründete Universität bildete einen Hauptsitz der Theologie
und der Philosophie. Ulrich Zell, ein berühmter Schönschreiber,
Illuminator, Rubrikator und Schüler der Mainzer Offizin, war der erste
Drucker Kölns. Seine frühesten Werke sind Chrysostomus: Super
psalmo quinquagesimo und die Bulla retractionum Pii II., datiert Rom
16. März 1463. Von seinen vielen Meisterwerken verdient die
lateinische Bibel in zwei Grossfolio-Bänden (wahrscheinlich aus dem
Jahre 1470), besonders erwähnt zu werden. Die erste
niederdeutsche Bibel, eins der berühmtesten und wertvollsten
Erzeugnisse der Kölner Presse, gehört ohne Zweifel dem Nikolaus
Götz (1474-1478). Sein Geschäftsnachfolger war Heinrich
Quentell (1479-1500), der berühmteste Typograph Kölns und
Stammvater einer hochangesehenen typographischen Familie.

Solange die geistreichen Kombinationen

Heinr. Quentell.
Maddens nicht durch unwiderlegliche Thatsachen
unterstützt werden, kann die von ihm
angenommene grosse Druckanstalt und typographische
Ausbildungsschule der fratres vitæ communis in Köln nicht der
Geschichte eingereiht werden[20].

Auf die erwähnte energische und werkthätige

Münster.
Korporation dürfte die erste Presse
MÜNSTERS[21] zurückzuführen sein. Die
Brüderhäuser in Köln und Rostock standen mit denen zu Münster in
naher Beziehung und die ersten Pressen hier empfingen ihre
Hauptnahrung von dem Humanismus. Der Name des ersten
Druckers ist Johannes Limburgus, Aquensis (von Aachen), und
der erste Druck: Kodri Kerkmeister, Comedia (1485). Mit dem
nächsten Jahre verschwindet aber die Presse Münsters und taucht
erst zu Anfang des xvi. Jahrh. wieder auf. Bei der dort herrschenden
Gelehrsamkeit und Geistesthätigkeit bleibt nur die Vermutung übrig,
dass die mit Münster eng verknüpften Städte Köln und Deventer,
namentlich die letztere, dort Filiale errichtet haben; nur so lässt sich
die grosse Druckthätigkeit Deventers erklären.

Die grösste Bedeutung als Drucker in Münster hat der bekannte

Humanist Theodorik Tzwyvel. Von seinen vielen Druckwerken
sind jedoch verhältnismässig nur wenige übrig geblieben und die
Wiedertäufer, die seine Druckerei plünderten, haben gründlichst für
die Zerstörung gesorgt.

In LÜBECK[22], welches eine tüchtige

Lübeck und
Pflanzschule für den Norden wurde, erschien Hamburg.
1498 die erste niederdeutsche Ausgabe des
„Reineke de Voss“, von der das einzige bekannte Exemplar in
Wolfenbüttel aufbewahrt wird. In HAMBURG[23] druckten 1491 die
Brüder Hans und Thomas Borchardus. Aus dem xv. Jahrh. ist nur
ein einziger Hamburger Druck bekannt: Laudes beate Marie virginis.
Das Buch ist zwar sauber ausgeführt doch in seiner ganzen
Ausstattung sehr einfach ja fast dürftig gehalten. Überhaupt
scheinen die ersten dortigen Drucker auf keiner hohen Stufe
gestanden und nicht mit besonderem Glück gearbeitet zu haben.

Ein überaus reges geistiges Leben entfaltete

Magdeburg.
die reiche Stadt MAGDEBURG[24], wohin die
neue Kunst durch Albert Ravenstein und
Joachim Westfal, zwei Brüder des gemeinsamen Lebens, gebracht
wurde. Sie lieferten 1483 und 1484 mehrere kleinere Schriften, dann
aber auch ein grösseres, auf Laien berechnetes niederdeutsches
Evangelienbuch in Folio. Westfal, der aus Stendal stammte, zog
1486 oder 1487 mit der Offizin nach dort; von Ravenstein hört man
nichts weiter.

Eine staunenswerte Thätigkeit entfaltete Moritz Brandis, der

von dem damals im Erzstift regierenden kunstsinnigen Erzbischof,
Ernst, Prinz von Sachsen, aus Leipzig berufen wurde. Seine Offizin
war mit zwölf Typengattungen und mit mindestens 9 Suiten von
Initialen ausgestattet. Sein Meisterdruck ist die erste Ausgabe eines
Missale in Folio; die zweite Stelle gebührt dem Halberstädter
Breviarium in 8° von 1495.

Besondere Beachtung verdient die

Die Xylographie
Magdeburger Xylographie. Schon die ersten in Magdeburg.
Drucke von dort zeigen Holzschnitte. Moritz
Brandis lieferte 1492 einen Folianten mit vierzig, 1494 einen anderen
mit elf Holzschnitten. Die meisten der, während eines Zeitraumes
von siebzehn Jahren erschienenen Holzschnitte zeigen eine solche
künstlerische Verwandtschaft, dass man auf die Abstammung von
einem und demselben Künstler oder von einer und derselben
Kunstanstalt schliessen muss. Dies wird noch bestätigt durch einen,
im Kloster Zinna, dem einzigen Ort der Mark Brandenburg, ausser
Stendal, der im xv. Jahrhundert eine Presse hatte, gedruckten
„Marienpsalter“, ein für damalige Zeit seltenes Prachtwerk, das auf
116 Blatt in Quart nicht weniger als 189 vortreffliche Holzschnitte
enthält[25].

LEIPZIG[26], das später eine so wichtige

Leipzig.
Rolle in der Geschichte der Typographie spielen Andr. Friesner.
sollte, erhielt eine Druckerei erst zu einer Zeit, als
manche andere Städte schon Bedeutendes geleistet hatten; ja es
war nicht einmal die erste Stadt Sachsens, die die Kunst in ihren
Mauern aufnahm, denn es giebt bereits Bücher aus dem Jahre 1473
mit dem Druckorte MERRSBORG[27]. Trotzdem ist die
Einführungsgeschichte in Nebel gehüllt. Thatsache ist nur, dass
Andreas Friesner, Sohn eines Ratsherrn in Wunsiedel, ein
gelehrter Mann, der mit Sensenschmid in Nürnberg zusammen
gewirkt hatte und 1479 nach Leipzig als Professor der Theologie
berufen wurde, eine Buchdruckerei mit sich brachte. Ob er jedoch
selbst gedruckt hat, oder ob er vielleicht seine Offizin einem der, als
die frühesten bekannten, Buchdrucker Leipzigs übergeben hat, lässt
sich nicht ermitteln. Im Jahre 1482 bekleidete Friesner die Stelle
eines Rektors der Universität Leipzig. Er starb in Rom im Jahre 1504
und vermachte seine Presse dem Leipziger Predigerkonvent[28].

Ein datierter Druck ist erst aus dem Jahre

Erster datierter
1481 bekannt, er trägt jedoch keine Druckerfirma. Druck.
Es ist ein sehr sauber auf gutes Papier
gedrucktes Bändchen in klein Quart, so frisch aussehend, als wäre
es erst vor einem Jahrzehnt aus der Presse gekommen. Es führt den
Titel: Johāis viterbiēsis: Glosa sup. Apocalipsim und das Impressum:
Lipczk MCCCC LXXXI in pfesto michahelis. Der Schnitt der,
namentlich durch ihre absonderlich geformten Initialen sich
auszeichnenden halbgothischen Type ist derselbe, mit welchem das
erste mit Namen des Druckers versehene Buch Leipzigs gedruckt
wurde: Albici tractatulus de regimine hominis, welches von Marcus
Brandis (1487) herrührt. Nicht weniger gut ist ein Benedictionale
des Marcus Brandis aus dem Jahre 1487. Die Notensysteme sind rot
eingedruckt, aber behufs handschriftlicher Einzeichnung der Noten
leer gelassen. Für mit Marcus Brandis identisch wurde früher
Moritz Brandis (1488-1498) gehalten, der, wie erwähnt, später
nach Magdeburg zog.

Konrad Kachelofen, der langezeit für

K. Kachelofen.
Leipzigs ersten Buchdrucker angesehen wurde,
entwickelte eine grosse Thätigkeit von 1489 ab,
in welchem Jahre er Joh. Widmanns von Eger: „Behende vnd
hübsche Rechenung auf allen Kaufmannschaft“ druckte, ein
Lehrbuch der elementaren Mathematik, in welchem auch einfache
Holzschnitte vorkommen. Eine ausgezeichnete Leistung ist das im
Jahre 1495 gedruckte Meissner Missale. 1495 zog Kachelofen, der
in Leipzig herrschenden Pest wegen, nach Freiberg; die Leipziger
Stadtbibliothek besitzt jedoch einen „Leipzig 1513“ datierten Druck
von ihm.

Vor dem Schluss des xv. Jahrhunderts konnte Leipzig über 150
datierte Drucke aufweisen, abgesehen von den vielen undatierten.

[1] Worte eines Engländers H. Noel Humphreys, in seiner

History of the art of printing.
[2] Es befindet sich je eins der Exemplare in Darmstadt, Dresden
(nicht vollständig) und Wien (sehr schön und vollständig).
[3] J. Wetter, Conrad Henlif oder Henekies. Mainz 1851.
[4] Wir schlagen den geographischen Weg ein, ohne uns streng
an die chronologische Folge der Einführung der Kunst zu halten.
[5] L. de Laborde, Débuts de l'impr. à Strassbourg. — J. D.
Schöpflin, Vindiciae typographicae. Strassburg 1760.
[6] Die Bibliothek des Börsen-Vereins in Leipzig besitzt hiervon
ein Exemplar.
[7] Nach Madden ist Mentelin aus der Offizin der „Brüder des
gemeinsamen Lebens“ im Kloster am Weidenbach in Köln 1463
nach Strassburg gekommen. Alle Drucke mit den absonderlichen
R, die man von vielen Seiten Mentelin zuschreibt, will Madden
nach Köln verlegen.
[8] J. L. Äbi, Die Buchdruckerei in Beromünster. Einsiedeln 1870.
[9] D. A. Fechter, Beiträge zur ältesten Gesch. d. B. in Basel.
Basel 1863 (B. Taschenbuch). — J. Stockmeyer und B. Reber,
Beiträge zur Baseler Buchdruckergeschichte. (Herausg. von der
Hist. Gesellsch.) Basel 1840. — Streuber, Neuere Beiträge zur
Baseler Buchdruckergeschichte. Basel 1846.
[10] Dr. K. D. Hassler, Die Buchdrucker-Geschichte Ulms. Ulm
1840. — G. W. Zapf, Älteste Buchdruckergeschichte Schwabens.
Ulm 1791.
[11] G. C. Mezger, Augsburgs älteste Druckdenkmale. Augsburg
1840. — G. W. Zapf, Augsburgs Buchdruckergeschichte. 2 Teile.
Augsburg 1786.
[12] G. W. Panzer, Älteste Buchdruckergeschichte Nürnbergs.
Nürnberg 1789. — J. Baader, Beiträge z. Kunstgesch.
Nürnbergs. 2 Hefte. Nördlingen 1860-62.
[13] G. E. Waldau, Leben A. Kobergers. Dresden 1786. — Dr. O.
Hase, Die Koburger. Leipzig 1869.
[14] Als Vorläufer einer zweiten Auflage seines Buches über die
Koberger, zugleich als Weihgeschenk zu dem 25jährigen
Jubiläum des, um die Geschichte des Buchhandels
hochverdienten Dr. Albr. Kirchhoff, liess Dr. Hase (einer der Chefs
der Firma Breitkopf & Härtel) ein: Brieffbuch der Koberger zw
Nurmbergk, Leipzig 1881 (in 25 Expl.) erscheinen, das namentlich
Briefe des Ant. Koberger an Joh. Ammerbach in Basel enthält.
Diese Briefe erstrecken sich über die Jahre 1493-1509, werden
aber von 1504 ab immer sparsamer und kürzer, der letzte und
einzige Brief aus 1509, „dem Erbern weisen meyster Hanssen
Froben zw bassell meinem Sundern gunstigen guten Freund“
geschrieben, schliesst, das Obengesagte von der Fürsorge
Kobergers bestätigend: „Lieber meyster Hans jch bitt euch wollet
gute Fass machen lassen Die starck vnd Dick von holcz sind wan
es ist So grawsam wetter bey vnss von regen vnd von schne Das
gleichen kein man gedenkt Jch hab euch gancz eyllet
geschrieben Die furlewt seyn wegfertig“.
[15] Placidius Sprenger, Älteste Buchdruckergeschichte von
Bamberg. Nürnberg 1800. — H. I. Jæck, Jubelschrift 1840.
Erlangen 1840. Vergl. auch Kap. II, S. 29.
[16] Es ist hiervon nur ein Exemplar, in Wolfenbüttel befindlich,
bekannt.
[17] M. Denis, Wiens Buchdr.-Gesch. bis 1560. Wien 1782. — Die
österr. Buchdrucker-Zeitung 1873, Nr. 9 u. flg. enthalten sehr
detaillierte „Beiträge zur Geschichte der Buchdruckerei in Wien“
bis auf die neueste Zeit.
[18] Das Buchdruckerwappen ist ein schwarzer Adler auf
goldenem Schild, in der rechten Klaue einen Winkelhaken, in der
linken ein Tenakel haltend; den Helmschmuck bildet ein Greif in
halbem Körper, zwei Druckerballen an einander drückend.
Merkwürdigerweise herrscht Zweifel, ob der ursprüngliche Adler
der zweiköpfige Reichsadler gewesen oder ein einköpfiger. E.
Bekkers Eintreten für den ersteren (in seiner Broschüre „Das
Buchdruckerwappen“. Darmstadt 1837) stützt sich auf nur
schwache Argumente. Von den von ihm angezogenen Quellen
liegt keine weiter zurück als im Jahre 1730. Ein Frankfurter
Messkatalog, also eine offiziöse Erscheinung, aus d. J. 1662 trägt
auf dem Titel den einköpfigen Adler, ob es mit älteren der Fall ist,
ist uns unbekannt. Auch Ernestis „Wohleingerichtete
Buchdruckerei“, 1721, bildet den Adler einköpfig ab. Der Greif soll
erst später durch Kaiser Ferdinand i. dem Wappen hinzugefügt
worden sein.
[19] Auch hierin dürfte ein Beweis gegen den zweiköpfigen Adler
im Buchdruckerwappen liegen; denn, dürfte jeder Buchdrucker
diesen führen, so lag ja darin keine Bevorzugung Winterburgers.
[20] Vergl. die eingangs erwähnten: Madden, Lettres d'un
bibliographe, zugleich IV. Kap. S. 68.
[21] J. B. Nordhoff, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Münsterschen
Humanismus. Münster 1874.
[22] J. H. v. Seelen, Nachricht über die Bchdkst. Lübeck 1740. —
Deecke, Einige Nachrichten etc. Lübeck 1834.
[23] J. M. Lappenberg, Gesch. d. Bchdkst. in Hamburg. 1840.
[24] L. Götze, Ältere Gesch. d. Bchdkst. in Magdeburg.
Magdeburg 1872. Hierzu ein Supplement.
[25] Ein gut erhaltenes Exemplar besitzt die Stadtbibliothek in
Thorn.
[26] J. H. Leich, De orig. typogr. Lipsiensis 1740. — J. J. Müller,
Incunabula typogr. Lips. Leipzig 1720.
[27] Die Behauptung, dass dies nicht Merseburg sei, sondern
Mörsburg am Bodensee, hat sich längst als unbegründet
erwiesen.
[28] Dr. G. Wustmann in seiner Schrift: „Die Anfänge des
Leipziger Bücherwesens“, 1879, hält dafür, dass die Kunst schon
v o r Friesner geübt wurde.
 IV. KAPITEL. [←]

DIE VERBREITUNG DER BUCHDRUCKERKUNST IM

AUSLANDE.

Italien: Subiaco und Rom. Venedig. Foligno. Mailand. Florenz. Spanien und
Portugal. Frankreich: Paris. Lyon. Die Niederlande: Die Histoires. Colard
Mansion. England: William Caxton. Skandinavien: Dänemark. Schweden. Die
slawischen Länder. Ungarn. Die Türkei.

OR allen fremden Ländern gebührt

Die Verdienste
ITALIEN der hohe Ruhm, die der Italiener.
Buchdruckerkunst zuerst
aufgenommen, sie wesentlich verbessert, vervollkommnet
und in edelster Weise verwendet zu haben, und mit diesem Ruhm,
den man den Italienern in vollstem Masse zollen muss, könnten sie
wohl zufrieden sein. Wenn sie jedoch noch im Jahre 1868 soweit
gingen, ihrem Landsmann Pamphilo Castaldi als dem Erfinder der
Buchdruckerkunst in seinem Geburtsorte Feltre ein Denkmal zu
errichten, so verfielen sie aus missverstandenem Patriotismus in
einen Irrtum, zu dessen Entschuldigung sich noch bei weitem
weniger sagen lässt, als für die Ansprüche der Holländer.
 Wie für die klassischen und bildenden Künste war Italien auch
für die Poesie das gelobte Land und hatte bereits seinen Dante,
Boccaccio und Petrarca hervorgebracht. Es waren namentlich die
Höfe der Mediceer in Florenz und der Herzöge von Este in Ferrara,
welche die Mittelpunkte der Kultur bildeten, an welchen die
genannten grossen Sterne und noch manche zweiten Ranges
glänzten. Die nach der Eroberung von Konstantinopel (1453) nach
Italien geflüchteten Gelehrten nährten noch mehr den Sinn für die
klassische Litteratur und fanden Unterstützung bei den aufgeklärten
Fürsten, welche Pflanzschulen für die Wissenschaften und
Bibliotheken gründeten und die Werke der griechischen Klassiker
übersetzen liessen.

So war in Italien wie in keinem andern Lande der Boden für die
neue Kunst geebnet. Bereits im Jahre 1480 hatten vierzig Städte
Buchdruckereien, zumteil hervorragender Art, die namentlich mit der
Herausgabe der Klassiker beschäftigt waren, während in dem
Mutterlande der Typographie noch immer Gebetbücher und trockene
Kompendien die hauptsächlichsten Druck-Erzeugnisse bildeten.

Conrad Sweynheim und Arnold

Conrad Sweyn-
Pannartz, wahrscheinlich zwei der überall hin heim und
verstreuten Schüler Gutenbergs, gründeten die Arnold Pannartz.
erste Druckerei Italiens in dem Kloster SUBIACO.
Das Städtchen Subiaco mit dem berühmten Stammkloster der
Benediktiner liegt in unwirtlichster Berggegend 14 Stunden von Rom.
Entfernt von der Stadt auf den höchsten nackten Felsen ragt das nur
mit grossen Schwierigkeiten zu ersteigende Kloster. Der
Kommandaturabt desselben, der Kardinal Johannes a Turrecremata,
ein eifriger Bewunderer der Buchdruckerkunst, veranlasste durch
einige Mönche deutscher Nation die Einberufung Conrads aus
Schweinheim, bei Mainz, und Arnold Pannartz' aus Prag. Sie kamen
1464 an. Zuerst entstand ein Donatus, dann des Lactantius De
divinis institutionibus (1465), des heiligen Augustinus De civitate dei
(1467), und wahrscheinlich auch 1465 Ciceros De oratore[1].

Der Lactantius war das erste Buch, welches

Die römische
in römischer Schrift gedruckt wurde. Die Schrift.
Kalligraphie hatte in Italien bereits zu den Zeiten
der Römischen Kaiser eine hohe Stufe erreicht. Durch den Wechsel
der herrschenden Völker in Italien änderte sich auch die Schrift
vielfach. Als die Gothen im v. Jahrh. sich zu Herren Italiens machten,
fingen die römischen Kapital-Buchstaben schon an, eine veränderte
Gestalt anzunehmen; die eigentliche kleinere runde Kurrentschrift
kam jedoch erst im viii. Jahrhundert auf. Nichts natürlicher, als dass
Sweynheim und Pannartz sich dem nationalen und gefälligen
Schriftsystem zuwendeten und für ihr Werk die römische Schrift
annahmen, der sich die jetzige Antiqua fast ganz anschliesst. Ein in
Paris befindliches Manuskript, welches 1459 in Italien geschrieben
wurde, des heiligen Augustinus De civitate dei, zeigt ganz die Schrift,
wie sie in dem Lactantius verwendet wurde. In dem ersten Bogen
des Werkes ist, um die griechischen Zitate hineinzuschreiben, Raum
gelassen; in den späteren Bogen wurden zum erstenmal griechische
Typen verwendet, denn die Zitate in Schöffers Princeps-Ausgabe
von Ciceros De officiis waren Holzschnitte.

Es zeigten sich jedoch bald die Schwierigkeiten einer so

abgelegenen, schwer zugänglichen Lage und Sweynheim und
Pannartz folgten daher gern der Einladung der beiden Brüder Pietro
und Francesco Marquis von Massimi, nach ROM zu kommen; in
deren Palast sie 1467 installiert wurden, zunächst um Ciceros Briefe
zu drucken. In dieser Ausgabe findet man zum erstenmale die reine
Antiqua, wie sie schon in den Manuskripten des viii. u. ix. Jahrh.
vorkommt.

In den fünf folgenden Jahren entwickelten

Pannartz und
Sweynheim und Pannartz eine grosse, jedoch Sweynheims
weit über ihre Kräfte gehende Thätigkeit, die sie Unglück.
dem geschäftlichen Ruin entgegenführte. Aus
ihren Pressen gingen hauptsächlich Ausgaben der Klassiker hervor,
unter anderen ein Livius (1469), von welchem ein Exemplar, 1815,
mit nahe an 20000 Mk. bezahlt wurde. Rom war zwar ein Sitz der
Gelehrsamkeit, lag aber ausserhalb des grossen Verkehrskreises. In
dem Verhältnis, wie sich das Bücherlager von Sweynheim und
Pannartz füllte, leerte sich ihre Kasse, und als sie den 5. Band der
Bibelerklärungen des Nikolas de Lyra gedruckt hatten, waren sie
ganz ohne Mittel. Der Herausgeber des Werkes, ihr Freund der
Bischof Andr. Bussi, empfahl sie zwar dringend der Unterstützung
des Papstes Sixtus iv. Das Gesuch, welches für die
Buchdruckergeschichte deshalb ein besonderes Interesse hat, weil
man daraus erfährt, dass die gewöhnliche Auflage eines Buches 275
Exemplare gewesen, von den populären Werken 550, hat jedoch
entweder gar keinen oder keinen genügenden Erfolg gehabt und die
Vereinigung ward aufgelöst. Sweynheim scheint sich nach der
Trennung hauptsächlich mit Schriftschneiderei beschäftigt zu haben
und machte auch die ersten Versuche, Landkarten für die
Buchdruckerpresse in Kupfer hoch geschnitten herzustellen, um
damit die Geographie des Ptolomäus zu drucken, erlebte aber nicht
die Vollendung dieses ausgezeichneten Unternehmens, dessen
letzte Platten von Arnold Bucking angefertigt wurden. Von
Sweynheim hört man nach 1473 nichts mehr. Pannartz druckte bis
1476, um welche Zeit beide Teilnehmer gestorben zu sein scheinen.
 Noch vor der Übersiedelung der Genannten nach Rom war
Ulrich Han (Gallus) durch den Kardinal Torquemada nach dort
berufen worden. Han druckte mit gothischer Schrift das erste Buch
mit Holzschnitten in Italien, Torquemadas Meditationes (1467).

Nach VENEDIG kam die Buchdruckerei erst

Venedig.
1469, überflügelte jedoch in dem mächtigen
Stapelplatz des Handels, wo zugleich
Wissenschaft und Kunst blühten, bald die aller anderen Städte
Italiens. Auch hier traten Deutsche als die ersten Buchdrucker auf.
Johann von Speyer (Johannes de Spira) druckte 1469 als erstes,
zugleich als Musterwerk, Ciceros Briefe. Sehr geschätzt ist auch
sein Plinius, von dem ein Exemplar 1781 in Paris für ungefähr 4500
Mk. verkauft wurde. Seine Type nähert sich der Antiqua; in der
Interpunktion wendet er Punktum, Kolon und Fragezeichen an. In
einer Ausgabe des Tacitus, die jedoch möglicherweise von seinem
Nachfolger herrührt, kommen arabische Zahlen als Pagination vor.
Seine Verdienste wurden von dem Dogen, Pasquale Malipiero, so
hoch geschätzt, dass man ihm das Privilegium als alleinigem
Drucker auf venetianischem Territorium erteilte. Von diesem
Privilegium, das glücklicherweise für die Verbreitung der Kunst nur
ein persönliches war, sollte er jedoch keinen Nutzen ziehen, indem
er 1470 starb. Sein Bruder Johann Wendelin von Speyer setzte
das Geschäft fort und druckte viele elegante Klassikerausgaben;
auch die erste italienische Bibel. Er verband sich mit Johann von
Köln (1471-1487), der sich wieder später mit Nikolaus Jenson
vereinigte.

Nach dem Erscheinen der Gutenbergschen

Nik. Jenson.
Bibel war die Kunst in Paris nicht unbeachtet
geblieben. Auf direkte Veranlassung des Königs
Karl VII. erging am 3. Okt. 1458 eine Ordre an die Die lateinische
Schrift.
königlichen Münzmeister, einen erfahrenen Mann
nach Mainz zu senden, der die neue Kunst
erlernen sollte. Die Wahl fiel auf Nikolaus Jenson, einen
geschickten Graveur, dem es auch wirklich gelang, die Kunst sich zu
eigen zu machen. Er kehrte jedoch nicht nach Paris zurück, sondern
ging nach Venedig, wo er als einer der berühmtesten Buchdrucker
von 1470-1481 wirkte. Er erkannte sofort die grosse Verwendbarkeit
der Römischen Schrift, dabei jedoch auch die Mängel der
vorhandenen Muster. Letztern half er ab, gab der Schrift noch mehr
Rundung und brachte die schöne „lateinische Schrift“ zustande, die
schnell zur allgemeinen Geltung kam und noch in solcher steht und
stehen bleiben wird. Jensons Schrift wurde erst die venetianische
genannt; in den italienischen Schriftproben heisst sie lettera antiqua
tonda. Die Italiener behielten den Namen Antico. Deutschland und
das nördliche Europa benannten sie Antiqua, Frankreich und
Holland Romain (auch droit) Romeyn, England Roman.

Um dem Geschmack der Zeit Rechnung zu tragen, schnitt

Jenson jedoch auch gothische Schriften, die sich ebenfalls durch
ihre Schönheit auszeichnen. Auch eine griechische Schrift, jedoch
ohne Versalien, rührt von ihm her. Seine Werke sind alle
typographische Meisterstücke. Er starb reich und angesehen im
Sept. 1481; selbst der Papst ehrte ihn und verlieh ihm den Titel
eines Pfalzgrafen.

Unter den deutschen Buchdruckern in

Erhard Ratdolt.
Venedig gehört in die erste Reihe Erhard
Ratdolt (1476-1486), der bereits oben unter den
Augsburger Buchdruckern genannt wurde; sein „Euklid“ (1482) in
gothischer Schrift und reich ornamentiert, gilt als ein Meisterwerk
ersten Ranges und verschaffte ihm nach vielen Seiten den
ehrenvollsten Ruf. Dieses Werk ist das erste mit mathematischen
Figuren ausgestattete. In den Prachtexemplaren davon kommt auch
zum erstenmale Golddruck vor. Seinen Kunstsinn zeigte Ratdolt
besonders durch Anwendung schön verzierter Initialen, die unter
dem Namen litteræ florentes bekannt sind, und durch seine sehr fein
in Holzschnitt ausgeführten Randverzierungen. Er war zugleich der
erste, der Titelblätter in modernem Sinn allgemein aufnahm. Auch
musikalische Werke mit beweglichen Typen führte er aus. Im Jahre
1486 folgte er dem Rufe des Bischofs Johann von Werdenberg und
kehrte nach Augsburg zurück, wo er nur bis 1516 wirkte, wenigstens
finden sich nach dieser Zeit keine Spuren einer geschäftlichen
Thätigkeit.

Noch ist Christoph Valdarfer, der später

Christoph Val-
nach Mailand übersiedelte, zu nennen. In darfer.
Venedig druckte er noch das Decamerone des
Boccaccio, von welchem ein Exemplar im Jahre 1812 nach dem
Tode des Herzogs von Roxburgh für 2260 £ Sterl. (über 45000 Mk.)
verkauft wurde, die höchste Summe, die je für ein Buch gezahlt
wurde.

Am Schluss des Jahrhunderts (1494) ging

Aldus Pius
noch ein typographischer Stern erster Grösse in Manutius.
Venedig auf: Aldus Pius Manutius, dessen
Glanz die nächste Periode erfüllt. Zu dieser Zeit waren gegen 150
Druckereien auf einmal in Venedig in Betrieb. Über 3000 Werke
hatten bis dahin hier das Licht erblickt. Nimmt man die Auflage eines
Werkes durchschnittlich auf nur 300 Exemplare an, und jedes Werk
durchschnittlich zu zwei Bänden, so macht dies gegen zwei Millionen
Bände.