How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight From His Own Letters and Work [Paperback]

I have been writing professionally for ten years and have had a couple of books on Amazon. So, I hesitate to give any work two stars. However, each book must stand or fall on its own merit. The title "How to write like Chekhov" is ambitious. He was such a wordsmith and craftsman that anybody who loves to read and write can hardly resist the temptation to buy this work. Yet, it falls short in almost every aspect as a book to help those who wish to learn the writing craft. Had the book been titled differently, something along the lines of "Chekhov's letters and thoughts on writing" or similar, I would have given this work a higher score.

Yet, for both novice and experienced writer alike, there is little writing advice here that can be gleaned and put to immediate use. Most of Chekhov's letters in this book "do not" translate in useful easy to use writing advice. In other words, after reading this book you will still not have sufficient help to write like Chekhov.

It would have been more useful, though maybe not as honest, for the authors to glean all of Chekkov's thoughts on writing, and crystallize them into some absolutes. Instead the reader wades through nearly 200 pages, and is left disappointed.

If you want to write like Chekhov or learn from his style, take a few of his stories or plays and type large sections on your PC, print them and with paper and pen, mark them up. Look how he uses dialogue, characterization, narrative summary, scenes and all the other tools of a fiction master.

In the glut of self help writing books, this slim volume is unique in helping the serious writer learn from a master's advice. It deftly avoids the mechanical shortcuts of most training manuals and helps even the professional to improve her craft with poignant and applicable advice. Like Chekhov, this book encourages the writer to dig beneath the technical pointers, exposing the habits of character, mind, and observation that go into producing an artist with something to say.

Chekhov didn't like to preach or teach; he also didn't like his readers trying to turn his writing into morality tales either, but the editors of this book have done to Chekhov's writings everything this Pushkin Prize winner and great playwright and short story writer despised. The editors have used Chekhov's writings to preach, teach, and turn excerpts, pulled largely from his unsuccessful and inconsequential nonfiction book, "The Island of Sakhalin," (a travel memoir about a large Russian island full of depressed and poor people living as prisoners or exiles in various penal colonies on the island) into tedious, uninsightful, and treacly advice on how to write.

What the editors do is take a piece of writing by Chekhov and then deceptively infer from it an illustrative piece of advice, not intended by the author, on the proper procedure by which to write -- like Chekhov.

In one instance, Chekhov describes the hideous flogging of a prisoner. The editors title the passage "Share Your Emotions," asserting that the writer describe his or her emotions when a participant in an episode. This title is the editors' special, technical advice to the would-be Chekhovian writer. The passage excerpted is more than three pages long, but the reader discovers --after 90 lashes of the whip -- that Chekhov used the word "heartrending" -- once -- to describe his emotions for and throughout the entire episode. Chekhov was a restrained, even "cold" writer. He did not indulge in emotional descriptions, yet the editors advocate the reader to follow their own advice contrary to Chekov's distinct and actual practice.

In another useless example, the editors advise the reader to "Use your sense of taste," titling another passage from "The Island of Sakhalin" this time as "Taste." Here, Chekhov describes greasy pancakes as (merely) "unpalatable." Even generic Writer's Digest how-to books are prone to give better advice to would-be writers than this illustration, offering such detailed words as "bitter," or "salty," as better substitutes for the more abstract "unpalatable." Again, the editors advice to readers runs contrary to Chekhov's practice.

The first 54 pages (excerpted from letters and notebooks) contain the most relevant, intimate, and juicy bits by Chekhov on his views of writing. These excerpts are delightful if not particularly useful (and are surrounded by less hokum from the editors), and can quickly be read while browsing in front of the writer's reference section at your local bookstore. The remaining 113 pages are a deceitfully dreadful, dreary drag to digest.

As a Postscript, it was ironic to find Chekhov using the cliche (using contemporary standards) in one passage from his writing in his memoir, "...lock, stock, and barrel," but nowhere in this dull book full of bromidic advice about writing is there even one warning to the beginning writer to avoid cliches or bromides. The editors exhibit no respect for Chekhov's writings, and they, sadly, certainly have no understanding of them. What you have with this book is a bunch of Chekhov's writings tossed at the reader's feet with cheap and generic editorializings added to them for a fast, easy buck.

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