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On Writing Books
 | On Writing Books Please recommend to me your favorite books on writing: |
Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times
(Henry Holt)
Writers on Writing began as a weekly column in the New York Times in which a variety of writers shared their insights and experiences about the writing life as they have known it. What this collection provides is a window on the world of our best writers. And what writer isn’t inspired by reading about the quirks and habits of fellow writers? What writer isn’t fascinated by other writers’ thoughts on process, the meaning of writing, and sometimes, their struggles with it? Imagine Gish Jen seriously considering giving up writing. Gish Jen! Or Kent Haruf writing in his basement with a sock over his head so he can get down first drafts without being "distracted by syntax or diction or punctuation or grammar or spelling or word choice or anything else that would block the immediate delivery of the story." Then there’s Mary Gordon’s notebook and pen fetishes. For these tidbits I’m grateful to these writers. They have informed me I’m no worse off than others and that I still have tons of work to do. Overall, these musings of writers on writing are most enjoyable. I found myself reading the collection every chance I got–in the car and between television commercials. For my money, particular standouts are essays by Carolyn Chute, Kurt Vonnegut, Sue Miller, William Saroyan, and Susan Sontag.
I find that in many books on the "writing life," writing is dealt with in isolation: learn this technique, observe this ritual, etc. That’s all well and good, but I truly appreciate when writers address the "life" part of the phrase: e.g., how do writers make money? How do writers find time to write if they are working all the time? Carolyn Chute’s essay drops us into her everyday world as she tries to get to her desk while her dogs beg for walks, her spouse and friends demand attention, and bill collectors come to call. Lucky enough to earn her living solely by writing, Chute reminds us that toiling in words is not without its sacrifices:
I am a person who can’t teach writing or make a living in any public way, as I get confused when interrupted or overstimulated. In a classroom or crowded room, I all but blank out. So my only income is from novels. This should explain the absence of dishwasher, clothes dryer, running hot water, electricity in all rooms, health insurance and other such luxuries.
Reading her piece, I understand for the zillionth time that we write for the sole purpose of getting something down and that’s it. That is the reward. If, someday, we are able to support ourselves with writing, all the better; but in the meantime, the time clock awaits our punch card, the kids have to be fed, and the landlord must be paid. Depressing? Can be. But when you know that other writers even further along on the path continue to worry about those same mundane things well after their fifth novel has been published by a major house, it somehow gives you comfort. And Buddhism looks more attractive every day.
I am grateful again to Kurt Vonnegut for not only giving me some of the best reads of my life, but for his level-headedness when tackling the ever-idiotic topic of Can Writing Be Taught? (As if we pose that question to burgeoning students of painting, music, or any other art). Vonnegut does us a favor by weighing in on the debate:
I had attended neither one [Iowa or Stanford’s graduate writing programs]. To have done so would have been good for me. Vance Bourjaily…said he regretted not having apprenticed at Iowa or Stanford when he was starting out as a novelist. That would have saved him, he said, the several years he wasted trying to find out all by himself the best way to tell a story.
What a nice antidote to those who claim graduate creative writing programs degrade the quality of writing in this country. As if those two tiny years forever damn you to write over-workshopped stories (I can think of worse crimes). Hilma Wolitzer considers the same question but tempers her response with the qualification that talent is a prerequisite for the workshop. I had hoped we could take that for granted.
Susan Sontag reminds us that at its core, writing is an act of self-expression.
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certains ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom. To be strict without being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to reread. Allowing yourself, when you think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along. No waiting for inspiration’s shove.
I also appreciate her ideas on the relationship between writing and reading:
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer….Losing yourself in a book, the old phrase, is not an idle fantasy but an addictive, model reality.
Sontag waxes on about reading and writing, offering some of the most powerful passages of the entire collection. Her prose is poetic, her insights moving.
Sue Miller’s defense of imagination and craft was enough to get me all choked up. In a world where autobiography is both king and queen, one wonders what happened to the worship of that old god Imagination. Would Virginia Woolf and James Joyce survive today’s autobio-tyranny? Miller writes:
Why did it bother me so much, that recurring question? [How much of your work is autobiographical?] It bothers me because I sense in it a kind of potential diminishment–yes, debasing–of the work I do. What the questioner seems to be somehow suggesting is that my writing is possibly no more than the stringing together of episodes lifted directly from my life, or from the lives of fascinating characters I have known…What’s hard–and what’s interesting–about a story is not so much the thing that’s in it, but what’s made of that thing. And then, of course, the making itself.
What a breath of fresh, sensible air.
This collection, ultimately, offers something for everyone who likes to look behind the curtain, to study the little man who puts on the big show. For writers, this book offers a brief but inspiring apprenticeship with the masters.
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