Italo CalvinoWriting Style

Kublai Khan reduces his empire to a chessboard, and the game ends with nothing left on the table but a square of planed wood. Marco Polo starts reading the wood. The ring of a dry year, the knot where a bud was cut away, the nest a larva left behind: the emptiness fills up again out of the grain, and the empire comes back inside a piece of furniture. One scene in Invisible Cities holds the whole method.

The books run on rules a reader can state out loud. A pack of tarot cards deals the plots. Ten first chapters begin, grip, and break off. A viscount comes home from the fighting in two halves, and each half walks off into the story to court the same woman on its own terms. Calvino announces the rule early and then obeys it well past the point where a lesser writer would let it quietly slip, which is why the inventions read as findings rather than decoration.

The surface of the prose stays plain. Trades, objects, distances, procedures, all of it lit evenly, with the strangeness kept in the architecture instead of the adjectives. That inversion is the part worth studying, because most writers do it the other way around.

He wrote the manual too. Invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard, he drafted five of them and named the values he wanted carried into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. He died before the sixth. The five that exist read less like criticism than like a working writer emptying his toolbox onto a table, which is why a page about his craft can borrow his own diagnosis of what goes wrong in a sentence.

Subtraction of weight

Calvino described forty years of his own work as the removal of weight: from people, from cities, from the structure of stories, from language. The move is subtractive and specific. Octavia hangs in a net strung between two mountains over a chasm, and its people live with less anxiety than most. They know the net will hold only so long, and they know precisely what the limit is. The weight has left the ground and gone into a rope. What makes this hard is that the removal has to be paid for somewhere: take out the floor and you owe the reader a rope, a rule, and a term of years.

The crystal and the flame

Two models of form, and he made writers choose between them out loud. The crystal is invariant structure, faceted and refracting, the same in each part. The flame keeps a constant outline while everything inside it churns. Calvino called himself a partisan of the crystal and then warned his own party to remember the flame, which is the most useful thing he wrote about revision. Decide which one your piece is. A crystal fails when one facet is out of true, a flame fails when the outline wobbles, and the two faults call for opposite repairs.

Modular assembly

He called his own late structures hyper-novels: accumulative, modular, combinatory. The unit is the module, not the chapter. A module is a piece finished enough to survive being moved somewhere else in the book. His model was Perec's Life A User's Manual, a cross-section of one Paris apartment house in which the route through the rooms follows a knight's tour of the chessboard and the contents of each chapter come from combining fixed categories. Schemes of that kind look mechanical from outside. From inside they produce more than free invention does, because each constraint you accept removes the choices that were making you hesitate.

The rule carried down to the smallest object

In The Cloven Viscount a cannonball splits Medardo down the middle, and the half that comes home goes about the countryside halving whatever it meets: a pear, a mushroom, a frog. That is the tool. A governing rule that stops at the premise is only an idea, and his rules reach the props, the sentences and the jokes, until a reader can predict what the rule will do to the next object it touches. Most imitations leave the furniture untouched. Check the smallest noun in your draft against your own rule and you will find out quickly whether you have a world or a pitch.

The pattern left unannounced

The ten interrupted books inside If on a winter's night a traveler have titles, and the titles, read in sequence, make a sentence. It is easy to miss on a first pass. That is the tool at work: a pattern completed by the reader or left uncompleted, with the pleasure of the find belonging to whoever finds it. The technique is hard because you build something you get no credit for on the page, and because a pattern nobody can reach has failed rather than deepened. Plant it where a second reading turns it up, and keep a version of the book that works without it.

The narrator with a stake

The Nonexistent Knight is written by a nun in a convent, Sister Theodora, who complains about the difficulty of describing battles she has not seen and who turns out at the end to be the warrior Bradamante, in love with a man in her own story. The frame narrator has something to lose. That one move converts commentary into evidence: what she dwells on, and what she hurries past, becomes readable as motive once you know who is holding the pen. Try it on a piece of nonfiction you are stuck inside. Ask who is telling it, and what that person needs the telling to accomplish.

Frame narrative

The frame is where the argument happens. Polo reports, the Khan listens and objects, and between the city descriptions the two of them work out whether any description of a place can be true, whether the empire exists, and whether Polo has been describing Venice the whole time. Compare that with a frame used as packaging, the storyteller by the fire who introduces a tale and then withdraws. Calvino's version keeps interrupting. It lets him repeat one form dozens of times without monotony, because each new city arrives as evidence in a dispute that is still open, and the reader follows two things at once: the city, and the case being built out of it.

Second-person narration

You are the protagonist of If on a winter's night a traveler, and Calvino gives the You a body, a chair, a bookshop receipt and a defective copy with the same signature bound in over and over. Second person usually reads as a stunt, because the pronoun points at somebody who is not in the room. Here it points at the one person guaranteed to be present, and it converts a private appetite, the wish to find out what happens, into the engine of the plot. The device also lets him break the fiction without breaking the spell, since the reader he addresses is having the exact experience he keeps describing.

Catalog and enumeration

Invisible Cities files each city under a heading, and the headings recur: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Trading Cities, Cities and the Sky, Hidden Cities. By the third chapter you are predicting the next heading. A list carries meaning two ways, through what it holds and through what it declines to hold, and once the pattern is established, the missing item does as much work as the present ones. David Lodge makes the same point about the shopping list in Tender is the Night, where the randomness of the purchases is the characterization. Calvino's lists are sorted. The sorting is the argument.

The charged object

Calvino claimed that any object entering a story turns into a magnetic pole, a knot in a network of relations that would otherwise stay invisible. His books are built on that claim. A plate of snails at a family dinner sends a boy into the trees for good. The same boy leaves the novel by catching the trailing anchor rope of a passing balloon and going out over the sea, so the book opens and closes on a piece of hardware. Objects carry what the prose declines to state, which is how his abstractions stay on the ground: there is a spoon in the scene, or a ring, or a length of string.

Inventing the premise and letting it cost nothing

The idea is usually the part a copy gets right. What goes missing is the bill. Cosimo climbs into the oak in the first chapter of The Baron in the Trees, and the rest of the novel is the invoice: how he eats, where he sleeps in winter, how he hunts, how he receives letters, how he conducts a love affair from a branch, how he votes. Each chapter is a problem the rule created. A premise that generates no problems generates no chapters either, so the writer starts importing incidents from outside the rule to keep things moving, and the reader registers that as arbitrariness long before being able to name it.

Reaching for fog when you mean lightness

Vagueness is the failure mode of writers who have recently discovered Calvino. He was allergic to it and said so: language used approximately, an automatism that levels expression into the generic, a plague he thought literature exists to fight. Valéry gave him the formula that keeps lightness honest, which is to be light like a bird and not like a feather. A bird is light and engineered, hollow-boned, muscled, aimed. A feather goes where the air goes. If your paragraph could describe a different city, a different marriage or a different afternoon without one word changing, you have written the feather.

Building a machine with no way to switch it off

Variation structures can run forever, and that is the weakness in them. If the plan is a rule plus variations, nothing inside the plan says when to stop, so the draft keeps producing units of equal weight until the reader quietly puts it down. Calvino designs the exit into the machine. All at One Point holds the whole universe in a single point until Mrs Ph(i)Nk_o says she would make noodles for the others if there were room, and the wish for space produces space, and the story is finished in a line. The ending is the last operation the rule can perform, so work out your ending before you write the middle.

Taking the philosophy and dropping the folktale

Before the fables and the puzzles, Calvino spent years working through nineteenth-century dialect collections and rewriting Italian folktales into one readable Italian, and the skeleton stayed with him. A want. An obstacle. An exchange with a price on it. His first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nests, follows a boy called Pin among partisans in the Ligurian hills and contains no games at all. Imitators who arrive by way of the theory write the essay and skip the wish, which is why their pieces have a thesis where the pull should be. A reader will forgive a strange structure. A reader will not sit still for a story that wants nothing.