The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
The other book on the same subject, built from stories and interviews instead of letters.
Read our take
On Writing
Bukowski on how to write, assembled from two thousand pages of unpublished letters.
- 2015
About Charles Bukowski
About the volume
On Writing, published by Ecco in 2015 and edited by the scholar Abel Debritto, collects Charles Bukowski's letters about writing. Debritto worked through roughly two thousand pages of unpublished correspondence to find them. Bukowski wrote to editors, friends and other writers for fifty years, and when the subject was the work he was more direct than anywhere else — about how often he wrote, what he thought of literary reputation, what he did when it would not come, and why he kept sending poems to magazines that rejected him for two decades. The book is not a manual. It is a writer arguing with people by post about what writing is for.
The volume, in more detail
Bukowski's own account of the craft is scattered through his correspondence rather than set down in one place, which is why the letters had to be searched rather than simply reprinted. The advice, where it appears, is unsentimental and repeatable: write because you cannot not write, do not decorate, and do not wait for a mood. Because these are letters and not essays, the tone shifts with the recipient — patient with young writers, blunt with editors, funny with friends.
Themes and analysis
Drawings on the bathroom wall
In the letter excerpt reproduced by Literary Hub, drawings sometimes outlive the handwritten stories they accompany: Bukowski discards the prose and displays the pictures in his bathroom. The joke reverses the expected hierarchy between a literary work and its decoration. His makeshift gallery also brings art into a room with little cultural prestige. Creativity can change medium and destination instead of making publication its only possible outcome. The anecdote is nevertheless a comic self-portrait offered to a correspondent, not transparent evidence that the writer has abandoned all performance.
The mule of rejection
The rejection passage begins practically: an editor may keep usable poems and return the rest, even the whole submission. Bukowski then turns a consoling maxim about rejection into the image of a mule. The comparison suggests endurance but also accumulated burden, leaving stubbornness close to exhaustion. It does not establish that rejected writing must be good. Read as a brief exchange with an editor, the joke makes persistence sound less like serene self-belief than a means of sustaining contact while another refusal remains possible.
Why we recommend it
The craft, stated plainly
Fifty years of letters searched for the passages where Bukowski says what he actually thought writing was.
Him at his most direct
With the subject he cared most about and no audience to perform for, the pose drops.
Advice addressed to particular people
Because the material comes from letters, arguments about craft remain connected to recipients and immediate circumstances.
What this book explores
Timeline
1940s–1993
The span of the correspondence the volume draws on.
2015
Ecco publishes the letters as On Writing, edited by Abel Debritto.
2018
City Lights follows with The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, on the same subject from other material.
Book editions
- Paperback
- Ecco
- 2015
- 9780062417404
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Screams from the Balcony
The selected letters of the 1960s, where much of this material originally sat.
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Factotum
The novel about the years of writing without readers that these letters describe from inside.
Read our takeOn Writing: frequently asked questions
What is On Writing?
A collection of Charles Bukowski's letters about writing, published by Ecco in 2015 and edited by Abel Debritto, who searched roughly two thousand pages of unpublished correspondence to assemble it.
Is it a book of advice?
Not in the how-to sense. It is a writer arguing by post about what writing is for, and the advice appears where it happens to appear.
How is it different from The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way?
That 2018 volume, edited by David Stephen Calonne for City Lights, covers writing through stories, essays and interviews. This one is letters only.
Why is the URL on-writing-charles-bukowski?
Because Anaïs Nin published her own On Writing in 1947, and that book holds the bare address. A generic title goes to whichever work is unambiguous, and the newcomer takes the author suffix.
Are the letters previously unpublished?
Most of them. Debritto drew on correspondence that had not appeared in the earlier selected-letters volumes.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document On Writing, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1On Writing
LettersCharles Bukowski, 2015Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
3Charles Bukowski
BiographyReaktion Books, 2012Used forThe correspondence habit and the writing life the letters describe.
4Charles Bukowski (Poetry Foundation)
WebsiteUsed forCareer context for the years the letters cover.
5Charles Bukowski: books and chapbooks (Verdant Press checklist)
WebsiteUsed forBibliographic details checked against the checklist.
6Charles Bukowski's Rules for Writing — selected letter excerpts
WebsiteLiterary Hub, 2015Used forSelected letter passages reproduced by Literary Hub in 2015, including the bathroom drawings and rejection/mule comparison. These are excerpts, not complete letters; no recipient, date or page number is inferred. The article's numbered advice headings are editorial framing.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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