How the fuck did he do it? how the fuck can he craft stories with the most incredible prose and still fuck the reader with puzzles inside the works? how can I become a writer like him?
The thing about Nabokov, at least from what his letters show, is that he was an actual autist. Not a meme autist, but an actual autist. And the obsession to which his endless autistic energy fixed itself was writing. Once you read his work through the lens of autism, it all makes sense. He autistically fussed over sentences and plot structure the way entomology autists fuss over fine differences in insect anatomy (though he fussed over that too).
>>25153652how can I learn to write like this? I don't have this type of autism but surely can start somewhere, right?
>>25153645read a lot, sleep a lot, brush em like crazy. no but going by what he said to do, do read a lot, and reread, cherishing detail, specificity, and originality. going by his works, make use of every opportunity unique to the medium, or unique to a subjective perspective. reverse things this way and that, or make them symmetrical, or at least resonant with other things. hide connections for rereaders.>>25153652except he wasn't. autism is more defined by social inability than fixation. he was a witty jokester with a colorful love life early on. although the train obsession...
>>25153665Forget word processors. Forget journals. Forget legal pads. Take a three-by-five note card. Sit in a comfortable chair. Try to make words on the card that are beautiful. Focus on that one card, like a gemcutter working on a jewel. When the card is beautiful as you can make it, pick up another card and repeat. This is more or less how he worked. A Nabokov novel is just a pile of beautiful note cards wrangled into a publishable shape. He said he wrote for pleasure and published for money, and I believe him. It was the focused gemcutter pleasure of perfecting his little note cards that gave his writing such a finished quality.
>>25153652This is the correct way of doing things btw. Reading him will make you conscious of problems you didn't even know could occurr in literature.
nothing of value to add just that i adore nabby as well and he deserves the bump
I just picked out Ada and immediately my nemesis, a fucking family tree. Is it actually important to burn all those connections in my mind for reading the book?
>>25153645“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”He said so in Speak, Memory. It's echoed by basically every single great writer. Excellence exists in the rewrite.
>>25155484no, but just by looking at the tree there are things to figure out, and things to figure out later.
>>25153686This but you don't need to be so silly in the procedure.If you look at it simply, you just need to be able to recognize life-changing beauty, and then put your own works through this insanely critical lens.But make sure not to be too critical, that's a bit too ugly
>>25153686is this like writing using obsidian? i don't use obsidian but can this method help me if I write in bursts of inspiration instead of sitting in front of a blank page and think nothing?
>>25157069>>25153686it's important to point out that he had a complete picture in his mind before he started writing. he didn't work on random tidbits based on momentary inspiration.>After the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of “this is what I’m going to write”—the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me. There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil or pen. Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one’s mind, can be compared to apainting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception, I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing.
>>25153645You have to be born and bred to the art like he was. He had every resource in place from birth to optimize his craft, and through recognition, drive and self-belief he brought them to bear. There's a reason so few writers of his caliber exist. It requires the favorable correspondence of millions of tiny variables to create one such artist.
>>25157243>the game is rigged from the startYo ho, it's genre fiction for me
>>25157243he learned three languages very young and had access to many books but that's it. keep in mind, he is less well regarded for how well he knew three languages, but how well he used one. and he took no private writing classes. he was reading dictionaries cover to cover while the entire continent was crumbling and his family was being killed. if you mean recognition from others, he didn't get much until well in his 50s with Lolita.his growth happened less in his privileged youth but through reading and writing later imo, novels, short stories, AND verse, which requires more precision. it took him eleven novels to get to Lolita, which itself had two failed manuscripts. if he was bred to be anything, it was a painter. his tutors called him hopeless.
>>25153645be an early 20th century Russian aristocrat child with an elite education who flees the country after the revolution
as a russian native speaker I actually prefer his russian written novels, my favorites so far are Despair; Glory; King, Queen, Knave and Laughter in the Dark. Those are pretty excellent
>>25153645He was the ultimate aesthete. Cultivate an aesthetic consciousness. Try to see the beauty (+ pity) in everything you perceive and think about how one might express it in words.
>>25159121>Cultivate an aesthetic consciousnessHow do you do this
>>25153645The problem with Nabokov is that it's all style and no substance, if he was a director he'd be Peter Greenaway
>>25158484This is pathetic revisionism. His first novel, Mary, was written when he was a teenager. It was circulated in emigre circles owing to his parents' connections. It was published several years later for the same reason. You can't claim, as you try to, that he learned three languages very young and had access to a private library, as if those are facts common to many childhoods. They imply immensities of wealth and status. You mention his tutors. According to Speak Memory, he churned through tutors at a blistering rate. All of his scientific hobbies were indulged and financed. He was, in brief, an aristocrat. And his works in Russian weren't as little regarded as you paint them. But you're right to observe his greatest fame was for Lolita. Everyone who knows the name Nabokov knows that.
>>25157149Then how come Lolita took him like 8 years and a gorillion index cards?
>>25159886what is substance for you?
>>25157243You are a failure until others call you success, according to you. He was a successful writer the instant that he decided to be a writer and write.
>>25159897I had no idea about his background. Mostly know him from blade runner 2049 Has that stained his public perception with readers?
>>25159850Slowly train your mind like a muscle to only allow thoughts, feelings, sensations that you enjoy for reasons that are a 2nd degree removed from the original reason.It's basically putting your foot down with yourself on what you really enjoy for reasons outside of nitpicky basic human thought and emotion, and putting this "filter" in your pocket so that you can use it whenever you want, which to an aesthete is just enough so that it never becomes something that becomes an object of its own disenjoyment
>>25160435>I had no idea about his background. Mostly know him from blade runner 2049get off my board, go to the library, and don't come back until you've aged out of your parents' health insurance
>>25160591>mom everything is so expensive now i have to work 2 more hours or doordash every day now :((
>>25159897my point was that what he is praised for, his perspective, his passion, his precision... he didn't learn that from private tutors that taught him writing. the english he uses is not an english that tutors can give you. i'm not sure how much you can call fame in small emigre circles recognition, and how much you can call mary a success when the most dedicated nabokovians are bored by it. actually i'm not even sure lolita counts. he was recognized for far more substantial reasons only after pale fire. whichever way you look at it, the kind of ability that OP talks about is the product of decades in literature. the sentiment of >>25158704 or >>25157243 greatly underrate his dedication and genius, and greatly overrate his upbringing. the most artistically relevant thing his aristocracy would have granted him was time, which he largely lost until he earned it back again. revolutions and wars aren't facts common to many adolescences either. his upbringing did help him become a private tutor in the meanwhile.>>25159934that "complete picture" takes time to develop, and isn't as complete as every sentence.>>25159886whatever substance means to you, emotional impact, character complexity, structural harmony, even philosophical insight, he had.
>>25159939Penetration
>>25161214I will penetrate you
>>25161083Buddy, do you think if he was farmhand callousing his hands 12 hours a day tilling the Russian soil his "perspective, passion and precision" would signify at all?
>>25161083Nabokov characters have no complexity, they all sound like Nabokov. That's why I stopped reading Lolita in fact, a 12 year old spoke exactly the same as the other highly educated adults in the novel, suspension of disbelief gone
>>25162843Unreliable narrator. You are only getting other people through the perspective of Humbert.
>>25162721right now everyone middle class has access to all the relevant resources he had
>>25162991Yet no one is producing works of art like lolita or pale fire, curious
>>25163127exactly
>>25162843Idk anon, Humbert Humbert and Kinbote sound very different to me
>>25163613No, "exactly" isn't right. Think about it again, but think harder this time
ok so I read Lolita recently and loved it. Got 2 more for very cheap and am wondering how the might stack up- Bend Sinister and The Defense
>>25160591Even if i wasnt well read, im expected to know evey author and their biography?
>>25162843There is absolutely precocious children that can rival adults in conversation.
>>25167434"he could do what he did because he was an aristocrat" is what "isn't right"
>>25168746Please learn some informal logic, it's infuriating to converse with someone who can't follow arguments
>>25163127So?
Recent genetic analysis also made his STEM butterfly or something discovery even more relevant.
