If a few weeks ago we published a article about the advice he gave us Borges to write (full of sarcasms, as only Borges could do), today we offer you some more "serious" by the hand of Julio Cortazar to write stories. They sure serve you.
We leave you with them.
Julio Cortázar's 10 Tips for Writing Short Stories
- There are no laws to write a story, at most points of view.
"No one can pretend that stories should only be written after knowing their laws… there are no such laws; At the most, it is possible to speak of points of view, of certain constants that give a structure to this genre so little pigeon-hole".
- The story is a synthesis focused on the significance of a story.
The tale is "... a living synthesis at the same time as a synthesized life, something like a tremor of water inside a glass, a fleetingness in a permanence "..." While in the cinema, as in the novel, the capture of that broader reality and multiform is achieved through the development of partial, cumulative elements, which do not exclude, of course, a synthesis that gives the "climax" of the work, in a photograph or in a high-quality story, the procedure is reversed, that is, the photographer or the storyteller is forced to choose and limit an image or an event that is significant".
- The novel always wins by points, while the short story must win by knock-out.
"It is true, to the extent that the novel progressively accumulates its effects on the reader, while a good story is incisive, biting, without quarter from the first sentences. Do not take this too literally, because the good storyteller is a very astute boxer, and many of his initial punches may seem ineffective when, in fact, they are already undermining the most solid resistances of the opponent. Take whatever great story you prefer, and analyze its first page. I would be surprised they found elements free, merely decorative".
- In the story there are no good or bad characters or themes, there are good or bad treatments.
"…not it is bad that the characters lack interest, since even a stone is interesting when it is dealt with by a Henry James or a Franz Kafka "..." The same subject can be profoundly significant for one writer, and bland for another; the same subject will awaken enormous resonances in one reader, and will leave another indifferent. In short, it can be said that there are no absolutely significant or absolutely insignificant topics. What there is is a mysterious and complex alliance between a certain writer and a certain subject at a given moment, just as the same alliance may later occur between certain stories and certain readers ...".
- A good story is born from the meaning, intensity and tension with which it is written; of the good handling of these three aspects.
"The significant element of the story would seem to reside mainly in its theme, in the fact of choosing a real or pretended event that has that mysterious property of radiating something beyond itself ... to the point that a vulgar domestic episode ... becomes the implacable summary of a certain human condition, or in the burning symbol of a social or historical order ... the stories of Katherine Mansfield, by Chekhov, are significant, something explodes in them as we read them and they propose a kind of break from the everyday that goes a long way. beyond the anecdote reviewed "..." The idea of meaning cannot make sense if we do not relate it to those of intensity and tension, which no longer refer only to the subject but to the literary treatment of that subject, to the technique used to develop the theme. And it is here where, abruptly, the demarcation between the good and the bad storyteller takes place.".
- The story is a closed form, a world of its own, a sphericity.
Horacio Quiroga points out in his decalogue: "Count as if the story had no interest except for the small environment of your characters, of which you could have been one. Not otherwise you get life in the story".
- The story must have a life beyond its creator.
"... when I write a story I instinctively seek that it is somehow alien to me as a demiurge, that it begins to live with an independent life, and that the reader has or may have the feeling that in a certain way he is reading something that was born by himself, in himself and even of himself, in any case with the mediation but never the manifest presence of the demiurge".
- The narrator of a story should not leave the characters out of the narrative.
"I have always been irritated by stories where the characters have to stay on the sidelines while the narrator explains on his own (although that account is the mere explanation and does not involve demiurgical interference) details or steps from one situation to another ”. “The first-person narration constitutes the easiest and perhaps the best solution to the problem, because narration and action are there one and the same thing… in my third-person narratives, I have almost always tried not to get out of a strictu senso narration, without those takes away that amount to a judgment about what is happening. It seems to me a vanity to want to intervene in a story with something more than with the story itself".
- The fantastic in the story is created with the momentary alteration of the normal, not with the excessive use of the fantastic.
"However, the genesis of the story and the poem is the same, it arises from a sudden estrangement, from a displacement that alters the “normal” regime of consciousness ”…“ Only the momentary alteration within the regularity reveals the fantastic, but it is necessary that the exceptional also becomes the rule without displacing the ordinary structures between which it has been inserted ... the worst literature of this genre, however, is the one that opts for the inverse procedure, that is, the displacement of the ordinary temporal by a kind of “Full-time” of the fantastic, invading almost the entire stage with a great display of supernatural party favors".
- To write good stories the profession of the writer is necessary.
"... to re-create in the reader that shock that led him to write the story, a writer's trade is necessary, and that job consists, among many other things, in achieving that atmosphere typical of any great story, which requires to continue reading, which grabs the attention, which isolates the reader from everything that surrounds him and then, when the story is finished, reconnects him with his circumstances in a new, enriched, deeper or more beautiful way. And the only way this momentary kidnapping of the reader can be achieved is through a style based on intensity and tension, a style in which the formal and expressive elements are adjusted, without the slightest concession ... both the intensity of the action as the internal tension of the story are the product of what I previously called the writer's craft".
Is the text of the image correctly written? Shouldn't it be "if you fall I'll pick you up and if I don't go to bed with you"?
Well yes BS Ángel, but it is a free image from the internet that we have selected to accompany the text. It has that little misspelling but it seemed like a very good phrase. Thanks for the clarification! All the best!