Some poststructuralist ways to answer the question: How to write? How to be an author?

Abstract

This article opposes to textbooks that teach ‘how to write well’ but paradoxically assume the condition of being a shaky tutorial that risks signaling which paths may make writing more authorial. The article has the support of Post-Structuralism, especially the references of Michel Foucault, Jorge Larrosa, and others. It discusses the possible routes for authorship in order to obtain an aesthetic and ethical text. Aesthetic, for it is careful with the form of words and the plasticity of writing, in the manner of a work of art. Ethical, because the writer writes it to others as if he was writing to himself something he would like to read not once but many times. It concludes that the texts that are worthwhile are those in which the authors risk their own reputation for developing a style of their own, whose télos could only be admirable writing; authors that do borderline work not to become a stereotype prototype; who rehearse-write it experimentally, for the constant attitude is to create.