How to write a good text? 5 theses of Tatyana Tolstaya

One hundred students gathered for classes in the spacious Yandex hall. The very first lecture was given by Tatyana Nikitichna herself. It was about what makes a good text. And I also listened to her, and with a hasty hand made a summary. As a result, I came up with five theses:

1. The quality of the text does not depend on its subject or length.
2. A good text differs from a bad one, as the living from the dead.
3. Knowing the rules is not enough to write a good text.
4. The text is alive if the author writes it with love.
5. A good text is built on the principle of a hologram: the part repeats the whole.

And now – in more detail.

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1. The quality of the text does not depend on its topic or length

The number of words spent on expressing your thought does not matter. The length of a good text can be any.

How to tell what a good text is? The concept of “good” immediately begins to blur: good to whom? for whom? under what circumstances? For example, are all the texts written by the ancient Egyptians good? But for us they are precious.

“Gilgamesh” is the first text that has come down to us, an ancient epic, but you look, everything is the same there. He wanted to be immortal, went to look for the flower of immortality, got tired on the way back, wanted to swim, a snake came out, ate the flower – it is immortal, but people are not.

When you read this text in translation, you cannot understand whether it is good or bad, because it amazes you that there are thousands of years from you to Gilgamesh, but the one who composed this is now one handshake from you, not five: he is nearby , he is the same as you, he also thinks where I came from, why I was born and why I must die and whether something can be done about it.

And it does not matter that if at this time there is such a thing as literature, it is not in the form that we know. But there is a human need to talk about their feelings. So tell everyone to sit and breathe, and think “oh, my God!”.

But the text is very simple. And in many places around the globe a person composes such things: life, death, love. Lived and lived and died. After all, if you think about it, it’s monstrous! Or lived and fell in love with someone – it’s incredible! All these themes are natural, eternal, they are never banal. What is a good text in this sense? And the devil knows!

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2. Good writing is as different from bad as living is from dead.

What is the main difference between good writing and bad writing? It’s like the difference between the living and the dead. You can publish a thousand rules, and they are written and published, you can put a whole shelf. Yes, all of these rules apply. And if you like some text and everyone agreed with it, or maybe not everyone, but a certain group, then if you look – are these rules observed there? Yes, they are. But if you take the rules and just follow them, then the text will turn out to be dead.

How to breathe your spirit into creation, how to make it alive and not dead? This is the task facing those who would like to write a good text.

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3. Knowing the rules is not enough to write a good text.

I don’t know what a synecdoche is. You can see what synecdoche means. But if I know what it is, I won’t use it any better. I have three thousand bones in my body. There are some that are not attached to anything. There are floating bones in the foot. You can know them, but will it help to walk?

Likewise in the text. It turns out that there are tricks. The author writes: “The sun has set, the sun has risen.” This is also a welcome. You can see this phrase in a thousand texts. Does this mean that the reception was applied? Or did you just need to tell that the sun had risen?

The technique is curious to know, but it will not help to make a good text.

Knowing the techniques, you can read other people’s texts, look at them and better understand how they are made. This writer loves verbs, this one loves adjectives. The text is neither better nor worse. How is that soup different from this one? This one has more pepper. Does this mean that if you put more pepper in it, it will become better?

There are times when you look at the text – and it’s unpleasant, disgusting, but it flutters and crawls, and you can’t get rid of it, although it’s annoying. It must be well made, with a strong composition and substance, and you are allergic to it, you break out in a rash and do not want to see it. It doesn’t make text good and bad, it makes it unpleasant for you.

Is it possible to make a living text, fully respecting all the tricks and techniques that some people want to teach? The question is who will perceive it. If you are dumb, you will not notice the difference between dead and alive. And if you are sensitive, this difference will hurt you.

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4. The text is alive if the author writes it with love

One teacher in America wrote a love story. Even cashiers read it, and in America they have no right to be distracted. Even if there are no buyers, they must sit and wait. And then – well, she can’t tear herself away and reads a love story under the table on her knee. It was called The Bridges of Madison County.¹. Why has he become so popular? What’s special there? A man arrives, he is all the same, it is described what he is. The teacher is in her thirties, they have an affair, and then she tells him to leave.

I remember that Ellendea Proffer, who was the publisher of Ardis, said: “I don’t understand how it’s made, why your Russian literature doesn’t make money, but this novel does.”

How do you know what will work and what won’t? I took this novel, leafed through, and this is what I saw there. This author has been a school teacher all his life and dreamed: I will retire and devote myself to literature, write a novel. And so it happened: he retired and lovingly wrote … trash.

But he did not write coldly, not according to the manual: what are we supposed to do there? every thirty minutes a bed scene? So, there is a bed scene.

No, his heroes settled right in his brain, they lived there, and he bore all this. And this living thing, maybe primitive, but alive – it stitched through this text and spilled into it. He poured the living thing into it, and it spread like a stain.

Whether this text is good, we do not know, but it is alive. And there is no other reason why he stood out among others of the same kind.

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5. Good text is built on the principle of a hologram: the part repeats the whole

One of the signs of a wonderful text is when every word, paragraph is about the same thing as the text as a whole. This is the principle of a hologram, when one piece is the same as the whole, only more cloudy.

Why this glare in an impressionist painting? Because in color and location it rhymes with that glare. But this dash is needed, because it takes the entire weight of the canvas. So in Chekhov’s stories: they are multi-layered and it is difficult to hug them with a single “hop”, but you can look at the inner floors and see how the part supports the whole. This is one of the hallmarks of a good text – in it the part supports the whole.

This is a classic – the attitude to the text as to God’s creation. We do not know how the world works, but we know that it is one. Any study confirms the same thesis: the world is arranged as a whole. Everything is arranged according to a single principle: giraffes, spiders, and text.

And when you write, you should feel what kind of genre, story or novel it is. The volume of the work will depend on the saturation within the phrase. Everything will be visible, by the phrase, by two, by three you will see how long the future text is, even if so far you have only an excerpt. The segment seems to be a straight line, but if you look closely, you will see what kind of arc there is 90 degrees or more, it will go in a circle or this small ring. You will see what the whole will be like Cuvier² restored the skull bone by bone.

The text has a feature: it contains important information within itself. It is not so easy to extract, but it contains it. If you have a phrase, scene, paragraph, intonation, alliteration, some beautiful floating text in your head, and the rest is burdock, look at it, it contains intentions, intonations. Your task is to capture what you like. After all, you do not like everything that you have done. You strive for what is good, and you grow something out of it. See what you can grow from it.

¹ R. Waller “The Bridges of Madison County” (Ripol-Classic, 2011).

² Georges Leopold Cuvier (1769-1832) – French naturalist, naturalist, founder of comparative anatomy.