Most of Carver's advice sits in one essay, 'On Writing,' with more scattered through his interviews. It's simple to state and hard to do, all of it aimed at wringing maximum feeling out of plain words.
Precise Language With a Little Menace
Carver's core belief was that ordinary objects, named exactly, carry real power. A chair, a curtain, a fork, a woman's earring. He wanted language accurate enough that a reader's eye never slid past it, because blurred or imprecise words, he warned, lose the reader completely.
He paired that precision with tension. He liked a low hum under the calm surface, a feeling that something was about to happen and something was at stake.
I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories.
Raymond Carver, On Writing
No Tricks, and Revise Without Mercy
Carver hated gimmicks. He borrowed a line from Geoffrey Wolff, 'No cheap tricks,' and cut it down to 'No tricks.' Above his desk he kept index cards, including Ezra Pound's 'Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing' and Isak Dinesen's line about writing a little every day, without hope and without despair.
He revised relentlessly, doing as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a single story and never fewer than ten or twelve. His long partnership with editor Gordon Lish is part of this, and it's genuinely debated. Lish cut Carver's 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love hard, sometimes by half, and the two versions read very differently.
Some critics credit Lish's knife for the famous 'minimalist' Carver. Carver himself grew uneasy with how far it went, and the fuller originals were published in 2009 as Beginners. Both readings have support, and you can compare them yourself. For how his process ran day to day, see the full Raymond Carver writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Name things exactly. Swap a vague word for the concrete object it stands for.
- Bury a little menace. Give the reader a low hum of something at stake.
- Kill your tricks. If a device is showing off, cut it.
- Revise past the point you feel done. Carver kept going for dozens of drafts.