Literary writing

The writing is the act to write. In Literature, it is the act of the author which produces a text.

The literary writing obeys to the standards of the Orthographe and the Grammaire, but also of the Rhétorique, the poetic . The writer uses Techniques of writing, tools of languages which enable him to work a style, and it is also authorized poetic licenses, Digression S, Néologisme S, so as to support its speech, to make esthetic its prose. Thus it is different and becomes artist.

The writing is the whole of the tools of Langage which make it possible to build a Texte which produces direction.

In the parts which follow, we try to present what is the work of the writing.

Writings

Three forms of writing

The writing can be defined by its wills, its goals, its waitings and through that can be divided into three forms, roughly speaking : romantic, documentary or informative and finally emotional. Of course, all these forms of writing are by no means separated by partitions, nor locked up; the boxes are simply créees for the simplicity of the explanation. The objectives, the wills, the desires of each one of them can be found in each other and even, very often, several of these descriptions are present in the same text.

Romantic

The romantic or narrative writing is a will to tell a history, to make it live at its readers without inevitably of other goals; it can be a history of crimes, love or Science-fiction. The objective is the same one: to offer a space out of time, out of the reality, which makes it possible to escape, to dream; this writing is necessary to the reader who has a need, ineluctably, to live other stories that his. Some will be extasieront, others will dream, some others will reflect and others, some, will compare the history with their to progress. The writing is not the only means: the Television, the Music or the Cinéma today took share on many of other arts which all, allow this escape, this reflection.

Documentary

The writing can also be documentary or informative: it is then a will to transmit its culture, its know-how, its analyzes or even its impressions. The reader will seek there a source of culture from which it will draw readily, but also from the different points of view on various things which will enable him to forge an opinion; at all events, this writing is the shape of council or assistance. There still, the writing is not the only media available.

Emotional

Lastly, the writing can, after the escape, the reflection, the culture and the debate to serve the emotion by the Poésie. It is the most complex writing: it is, for the author, a will to testify an impression, a feeling or an emotion, but also a need to release itself from a too fascinating part of oneself; finally, it is a will to justify its existence in a search for a form of immortality. The objective of poetry is to transport the reader in another universe or to open the eyes to him on its own universe, to show him the beauties which it meets with length of day without very looking at them. Its characteristic is due to the fact that it is expressed by using musics and images; she created a bond between arts and, in that, is often regarded as the most succeeded form of Art.

Goals and means of the writing

The writing is for the writer the means of transmitting an account, a Intrigue, a description, a portrait, a feeling, an emotion.

It is also the means of creating its own language. Each writer has his style, his manner of building the history, of building the sentences, of using the words. Each one uses, as much as it creates, its Techniques writing.

The purpose of the literary writing is (wished or not) to find themselves in the social universe, to be published, even if some, as Louis Aragon say:

The writing invented to fix, well rather than ideas for the others, of the things for oneself| Aragon |I never learned how to write or Incipit, 1969

According to the writings, the writer will use the writing (the stylistic devices, the Rhétorique, expressions, words) to serve his history; or then, it will use the history to serve its writing. In the second case, the style will be more probably original, nearer to the singular invention, because the matter even of the writing will have been the goal of the shaping. In the first case, the text will be a manufacture whose end will be the history. In both cases, the border will be always thin, each writing being a combination of manufacture and inventions. To write in language can also be to write a language. This language will be depend on the source language, of the sociocultural context; any text is an imitation.

This thought transference by the abstraction of the words is essentially approximate: the word does not touch not the object, there remains a Meaning distinct from the Signifié, and connoted inevitably. The reader has any leisure to interpret what it reads. Knowing that, the writer thus uses the writing by his evocations, by the possible directions of a mot.

To separate bottom and form amounts separating what was in the thought even of the dependant author.

Erasures

Speaking about this abstraction of the words, we can evoke the infinite combinations of words in a language. The possibility of being able all to represent by words, each possibility remaining personal with that which will write it. This giddiness is that which seizes the writer when he works a text, the demonstration of this giddiness is in the drafts of writers, very often filled of corrections, erasures, additions. (See on this subject of the drafts of writers on the site of the BNF)

A Romance , a New , a Poem, is never a first jet. The will of the word right, the research of the perfect rate/rhythm, exact sonority, the coherence of a character, of a scene, cause additions, variations, suppressions, returns. Research in its memories, its knowledge, its references, its imaginary, the books, the dictionaries (synonymous, definitions, rhymes, analogies, symbols…), the idea which emerges when it is not waited it and until it is necessary to note, all that belonged to the work of writing. Coherence in a novel can be done only at the price of a scrupulous work of writing, second readings, rewritings.

The image of the brilliant writer, blazing, who writes all in only once, remains a romantic imagination. Claude Simon had habit to say that if it did not put at his work table, nothing was done; in this direction the inspiration for him does not exist. The writing, far from being an act inspired, chaotic, a devouring passion, is a true work, a maturely reflected construction which does not leave anything randomly.

“ the difficult one in literature, it is of knowing what not to say. ” Gustave Flaubert.

“ Lis your erasures ” Jean-Paul Chanteau

“ It is by writing that one becomes écriveron ” Raymond Queneau

Jets

The first jet is distinguished. In the automatic writing of surrealist, that became the constraint. This first jet is that of the emotions. One can say that the unconscious one written. It is that without reserve, which one does not read again.

However, many writers are corrected during the first jet, returning immediately on a word, or some lines earlier on a sentence.

The second jet (and the following) will be those, rested, of the resumption in hand of the text, when the writer gives coherence, works the style.

Jean Guenot distinguishes the writing from the novel in “thin layers” of the writing in “thick layers”. In the first case, the writing of the novel is done in entirety, but initially by allusions, notes, key words. Then the layers are packed, throughout the novel. And so on, until each layer is completely finished. In the second case, the writing of the novel is done by part, each part being finished before passing after.

Styles

Any writing is personal: one recognizes the style of a writer, and to a lesser extent one can also recognize the style of no matter whom knowing to write correctly.

spoken style, a little vociferating, of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, in Voyage at the end of the night : “ " I will commit suicide! " that he prevented me when its sorrow seemed to him too large. It would not have known to explain it, it was a sorrow which exceeded its instruction. Coward who it was, I knew it, and he as, of nature always hoping as one was going to save it truth, but I however started, in addition, to ask to me whether there existed some share, of really loose people… It would be said that one can always find for any man a kind of thing for which it is ready to die immediately and quite content still. Only its opportunity always does not arise to die nicely, the occasion which it would like. Then it from there will die as it can, some share… There remains the man there on the ground with the air of a asshole in more and a coward for everyone, not convinced only, here all. It is only seemingly cowardice. ”

the style run, fluid, in the middle of Nature and in the memory, it is Marcel Proust (extracted from On the reading ): perhaps “ It does not have there days of our childhood which we however fully lived only those that we believed to leave without the food, those which we passed with a preferred book. All that, seemed it, filled them for the others and that we draw aside like a vulgar obstacle with a divine pleasure; the play for which a friend came to seek us with the most interesting passage, the bee or the sun ray awkward which forced us to raise the eyes of on the page or to change place, provisions to taste that one had made us carry and that we leave beside us on the bench, without touching there, while above our head the sun decreased by force in the blue sky, the dinner for which it had been necessary to return and where we thought only of going up immediately after, to finish the stopped chapter, all that, whose reading should have prevented us from perceiving another thing that importunity, it engraved of it on the contrary in us a so soft memory, so much more invaluable - with our current judgment - that what we then read with as well love as, if it sometimes happens to us still today to divide into sheets these books of formerly, it is not more but like the only calendars than we kept days flee, and with the hope to see reflected on their pages the residences and the ponds which do not exist any more. ”

long Sentences, skeletal punctuation, many brackets, style running of page on page of Claude Simon ( Géorgiques ): It was a very old general (at least it appeared to them such) him also (like elegant the alezane) without an atom of grease, dryness if not even desiccated, with his glabrous and wrinkled, cartonneuses cheeks one would have says, as if it had been extracted for the circumstance (the war) intact, ivory and momifié, of some tomb Pharaonic or perhaps preserved in the cold (it seemed there insensitive, carried only one light frieze coat (a long jacket rather) split by behind, as if it had put for a walk at Wood in the morning crossing in the alley of the Acacias the elegant ones in the barouche and victorias, the old contemporary casseroles of its youth (because for them it was at least to go back to this time, i.e. that which had preceded not this war but the other - since it seemed maintenantun made acquired that the History had to be divided not into centuries but into short periods of a score of years, time for the dressmakers with the Babylonian records to line the women in pipes of lamé, them farder the eyes of green, to suspend in their living rooms of tables cubists, then to make sell the whole with the biddings before seize-stop, after which the state of normal affairs (the war) could begin again and them old generals put out of preserve in the refrigerators to reappear intact, suited again to the service, i.e. to exert the right of life and death, if necessary on themselves (that one was to draw a ball in the head), to which price, during the months of forced inaction, it to them was allocated some Anglo-Arab with pedigree so that they can be delivered not to inspections but to the few hours of daily exercise and ventilation undoubtedly essential to the mummies).

Beginning of an American novel:

“ They feels him to Dallas to kill has nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn' T sour He could C it.

The Casino Operator' S Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They EDF him six cold.

Nobody said it:

Kill that coon. C it good. Take our hit fairy.

The flight ran smooth. With stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions. ”

a style with the machine-gun, white sentences of four words like death, it is James Ellroy, the beginning of The cold six thousands (title French: American death trip ).

Fund and forms

In a text, when the form corresponds to the bottom, the evocative power is geared down, or at least confirmed. A text evoking the soft power, the force and the immanente beauty of nature will be, with happiness, lyric. A sentence announcing the vibrating arrival of a bull beating the ground of its shoes, will be typing and striking p , of B , T …

To arrive to that, the writing calls upon poetic, rhetoric, the stylistic devices: Assonance, Alliteration, Metaphor, Métonymie, Comparison, Repetition, Oxymore, Anacoluthon… But also with simpler forms of artifices: placement of the words, use of times (present, future, preterit, more than perfect…), use of the adjective, the adverb…

“ good prose however must be as precise as the worms, and sound like him. ” Gustave Flaubert.
“ When I do not try to write, I read. Very slowly. Aloud in my head. I read by listening to words. When I also write, I hear the words. The writing, it is initially a text which I listen to. I write and I pronounce at the same time. It is necessary that I get along. ” Nathalie Sarraute, in Le Monde .
“ the form is the flesh even of the thought, like the thought is the heart of the life. ” Gustave Flaubert.
“ Plus one idea is beautiful, plus the sentence is sound. ” Gustave Flaubert.

Writing and History

To write falls under one time. The writer falls under a line. He is influenced by his readings, his time, his social class. Roland Barthes notices that the form chosen by writers varies with time, that contemporaries can have close or different styles, that all separates. “ Gide and Queneau, Mallarmé and Celine, Claudel and Camus, which spoke the same historical state about our language had deeply different writings. ”.

“ Placed in the middle of the literary problems which start only with it, the writing is primarily the morals of the form, it is the choice of the social surface within which the writer decides to locate the nature of his language. ”. In degree zero of the writing , Barthes approaches the white writing, the political writings , the writing of the novel , the Utopia of the language , is there a poetic writing , triumph and rupture of the middle-class writing , writing and revolution .

Workshop of writing
creative Writing
Technical of writing

Sources and bibliography

Roland Barthes, Degree zero of the writing (ISBN 2-02000-610-3)
Jean Guenot, To write, handy guide of the writer, with exercises (ISBN 2-85405-079-7)
Michel Volkovitch, Verbier (ISBN 2-86231-157-X)
Quotations of the world for the quotations of Flaubert

References

See Stylistic.

External bond

the Magister site.
contemporary collective literary Écriture
Plume Plucks Tralala the writing will overcome…
Techniques writing
Postskript, association proposing of the workshops of writing.

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