We’ve been talking about the urge to write this week so it’s only right to finish that way. I saw this Brain Pickings article about writing technique from Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), a German-Jewish literary critic, philosopher, and essayist, earlier this year and have been saving it for just the right moment.

Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

Think about that one; I think it’s pretty good advice, don’t you?

In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night.

I’ve never been able to work at Starbucks (I need quiet), but I have many friends who seek out the noise of a coffeehouse to write or edit. It was interesting to see someone note a “cacophony of voices” as conducive to writing.

The list really resonated with me; it intrigued me. So I tweeted it, and someone responded with this link to an obscure (in every sense of the word!) film, though I found the commentary interesting.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

I’m never without my pad of paper and pencil; it goes everywhere with me. The best ideas come to me in the strangest places or from the most unlikely sources.

No matter how assimilated—no matter how German—Jews were persecuted in 1930s Germany and Benjamin removed himself to Paris, though when the Nazis stripped German Jews of their citizenship in 1937 he became a stateless man. In 1940, while attempting to flee the conflagration in Europe, the Spanish police stopped the refugee group Benjamin was with; they were told they’d be deported back to France. Benjamin committed suicide rather than face torture by the Nazis, who were then in control of France.

Benjamin’s friend and colleague, German poet/playwright Bertolt Brecht, eulogized him in this heartbreaking poem “On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.”:

… Empires collapse. Gang leaders
Are strutting about like statesmen. The People
Can no longer be seen under all these armaments
So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.

(You can see the entire poem here in Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship by Erdmut Wizisla.)

Tweet: Keep a notebook, use discipline, let ideas incubate: 13 essential techniques for writing.
Tweet: The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin.

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