Customer Reviews

How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work

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I have been writing professionally for ten years and have had a couple of books on Amazon. So, I hesitate to give any work two stars. However, each book must stand or fall on its own merit. The title "How to write like Chekhov" is ambitious. He was such a wordsmith and craftsman that anybody who loves to read and write can hardly resist the temptation to buy this work. Yet, it falls short in almost every aspect as a book to help those who wish to learn the writing craft. Had the book been titled differently, something along the lines of "Chekhov's letters and thoughts on writing" or similar, I would have given this work a higher score.

Yet, for both novice and experienced writer alike, there is little writing advice here that can be gleaned and put to immediate use. Most of Chekhov's letters in this book "do not" translate in useful easy to use writing advice. In other words, after reading this book you will still not have sufficient help to write like Chekhov.

It would have been more useful, though maybe not as honest, for the authors to glean all of Chekkov's thoughts on writing, and crystallize them into some absolutes. Instead the reader wades through nearly 200 pages, and is left disappointed.

If you want to write like Chekhov or learn from his style, take a few of his stories or plays and type large sections on your PC, print them and with paper and pen, mark them up. Look how he uses dialogue, characterization, narrative summary, scenes and all the other tools of a fiction master.

In the glut of self help writing books, this slim volume is unique in helping the serious writer learn from a master's advice. It deftly avoids the mechanical shortcuts of most training manuals and helps even the professional to improve her craft with poignant and applicable advice. Like Chekhov, this book encourages the writer to dig beneath the technical pointers, exposing the habits of character, mind, and observation that go into producing an artist with something to say.

Chekhov didn't like to preach or teach; he also didn't like his readers trying to turn his writing into morality tales either, but the editors of this book have done to Chekhov's writings everything this Pushkin Prize winner and great playwright and short story writer despised. The editors have used Chekhov's writings to preach, teach, and turn excerpts, pulled largely from his unsuccessful and inconsequential nonfiction book, "The Island of Sakhalin," (a travel memoir about a large Russian island full of depressed and poor people living as prisoners or exiles in various penal colonies on the island) into tedious, uninsightful, and treacly advice on how to write.

What the editors do is take a piece of writing by Chekhov and then deceptively infer from it an illustrative piece of advice, not intended by the author, on the proper procedure by which to write -- like Chekhov.

In one instance, Chekhov describes the hideous flogging of a prisoner. The editors title the passage "Share Your Emotions," asserting that the writer describe his or her emotions when a participant in an episode. This title is the editors' special, technical advice to the would-be Chekhovian writer. The passage excerpted is more than three pages long, but the reader discovers --after 90 lashes of the whip -- that Chekhov used the word "heartrending" -- once -- to describe his emotions for and throughout the entire episode. Chekhov was a restrained, even "cold" writer. He did not indulge in emotional descriptions, yet the editors advocate the reader to follow their own advice contrary to Chekov's distinct and actual practice.

In another useless example, the editors advise the reader to "Use your sense of taste," titling another passage from "The Island of Sakhalin" this time as "Taste." Here, Chekhov describes greasy pancakes as (merely) "unpalatable." Even generic Writer's Digest how-to books are prone to give better advice to would-be writers than this illustration, offering such detailed words as "bitter," or "salty," as better substitutes for the more abstract "unpalatable." Again, the editors advice to readers runs contrary to Chekhov's practice.

The first 54 pages (excerpted from letters and notebooks) contain the most relevant, intimate, and juicy bits by Chekhov on his views of writing. These excerpts are delightful if not particularly useful (and are surrounded by less hokum from the editors), and can quickly be read while browsing in front of the writer's reference section at your local bookstore. The remaining 113 pages are a deceitfully dreadful, dreary drag to digest.

As a Postscript, it was ironic to find Chekhov using the cliche (using contemporary standards) in one passage from his writing in his memoir, "...lock, stock, and barrel," but nowhere in this dull book full of bromidic advice about writing is there even one warning to the beginning writer to avoid cliches or bromides. The editors exhibit no respect for Chekhov's writings, and they, sadly, certainly have no understanding of them. What you have with this book is a bunch of Chekhov's writings tossed at the reader's feet with cheap and generic editorializings added to them for a fast, easy buck.

Unlike most self-help, how-to-write manuals, I found How to Write Like Chekov to be both edifying and an extremely enjoyable read.

With writing tips taken from the letters and memoirs of the master himself, the voice is distinct, captivating, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, which makes the nuggets of advice sparkle. The book is chock full of valuable writing wisdom concerning a range of issues from style ("[One Problem] is that all these descriptions are complicated, mannered, and stale"), to content ("I saw everything, so it is not a question of what I saw, but how I saw"), and from purpose ("it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as the existence of God, pessimism, etc. My job demands only one thing of me: to be talented, that is, to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant evidence,; to illuminate characters, and so speak in their language.") to method ("Freethinking is essential, but to be a freethinker, one must not be afraid to write nonsense").

The honesty and forthrightness of this literary master regarding the pains, troubles, and insecurities of writing is also very encouraging to writers struggling to pen their own tales. In one letter, Chekov admits, "I will find a way to make time for writing for the New Times, but am glad that meeting deadlines is not one of your preconditions for my publishing in your paper." In another, he confesses, "What do I think of your stories? That you have talent is beyond doubt...it actually made me jealous that you had written it instead of me."

Useful, entertaining, humorous, and wise, How to Write Like Chekov deserves a place on the bookshelf of any aspiring writer, who, if they're like me, will soon find their copy as indispensable and dog-eared as Chekov's own story collections.

The writer as observer, not solution provider or judge; his purpose to depict life as it is in all its sordidness - this was the role Chekhov chose for himself, and that message is very clear from this "How to..." book.
Despite that premise, the old master is not shy to be firm and prescriptive about the "do's and "don'ts" of writing.
1) It's not "what" but "how"
2) Reading, Watching, Listening - essential to the writer
3) Cutting Mercilessly after writing
4) Do no invent suffering you have not experienced or witennessed yourself
5) No Lying in Art, and most importantly, do not lie to yourself
6) Never rush - deadlines are not important
7) Write with emotional restraint
8) Don't preach, don't teach
9) Pay no attention to the Critics
10) Do not put off writing

These are some of the learnings I took away, some contrary to what I had already learned.
Central to the book are notes and lessons observed from Chekov's ambitious trip to Sakhalin Island to expose the excesses of the Russian penal system at the time. His descriptions of life on that island definitely confirm Chekov as the master of "show, don't tell"

Shane Joseph www.shanejoseph.com

The premise of this book is amazing. Let's take the advice of a great author about how to write and then follow his example in his own writings, in order to become better ourselves. The quest is a laudable one and the editors do a good job of presenting Chekhov's advice on how to write. He was very free with his advice in his letters and why should we not try to follow that advice ourselves? The limitation of the book is that its a little to hands off on the part of the editors. Now that is a good thing- let him speak for himself. But I think the reader would still like the editors to share a little more about how they applied his advice to writing themselves. Its a great read and I recommend it highly, but if you want help applying Chekhov's advice, you going to have to fill that in yourself.

I had this one on my wish list because I found the concept intriguing. I found the excerpts of Chekov's letters and other writings to be dull, verbose translations and more to the point, their application to specific aspects of the writing craft were either tenuous, confusing, or non-existent. This is not the kind of writing book you can sit down with, open up to a page or chapter, and quickly and easily extract some nugget that will be useful to your own work. You really need to re-read each passage and then analyze it to try to discern whatever point the editors are trying to make. Compared to so many other more user-friendly books out there on the writing craft, this one is to much effort to get to any practical application. Disappointing.

As Lena Lencek, co-editor of HOW TO WRITE LIKE CHEKHOV, puts it, "In the end, the advice he gives his fellow writers comes from the 'felt fact' of his daily, minute-to-minute struggle to keep writing, to have something worthwhile to say, and to keep living at the same time." This pearl, among countless others, sprinkled in this extraordinary volume of Chekhov's writings is why ths is my number 1 gift-giving book of the year. Not only does the advice come from the writer who virtually defines lapidary style, but it comes with a rare dose of humanity, humor, and generosity: an understanding of the psychological stumbling blocks that stand in the way of every aspiring writer. What I particularly appreciate in this smartly translated and edited collection, is the mix of advice from letters to writers of fiction and from Chekhov's own non-fiction (read: medical-cum- scientific) narrative. And who cannot fail to be humbled, or bypass the counsel of a writer who more than a century ago had it right when he proclaimed: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, aspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, whatever forms the latter two might take." The co-editors, Lencek and Brunello, as well as the publisher, have done all writers, and readers, a service by allowing this gem to surface into the English literature.