Customer Reviews

The Best Writing on Writing (v. 1)

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I stole this book from my mother, who is also a writer, to carry on vacation, meaning to feel virtuous. Instead, I was captivated. The book truly is a collection of wonderful (it might be hubris to claim "Best") writing about writing--how it feels, how it works, how it doesn't, how it claims you and how you own it. I had to have my own copy, to keep rereading, and so I could underline. And, if you write, or want to, and ponder about the writing life, you should have a copy, too.

As you can see for yourself, the cover design was definitely not this book's main draw. The book had, in fact, been in my collection for over 5 years in the reference section without being referred to once before I actually sat down to read it cover-to-cover.

This collection was compiled in 1993, and is fairly broad in scope, with essays on, well, you can read the cover. I understandably found the essays on story writing especially useful, with Margot Livesey's How to Tell a True Story, Ben Nyberg's Why Stories Fail, and Diane Lefer's Breaking the Rules of Story Structure getting the most pencil markings, always a sign I'm paying attention.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I was disappointed with the essays by authors whose work I know best. Allan Gurganus and Donald Hall's essays were both effusive, self-indulgent, and not at all edifying, while the best part of Adrienne Rich's essay was the quote by Guy Debord that began it. It reminded me of a writing symposium back in college, when I looked forward all winter to meeting Bobbie Ann Mason only to be bored to tears with her stuttering and rambling; at that same symposium, though, I discovered a true writer/teacher in Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Paradise of Bombs, which you've undoubtedly not read, but should.

So I guess what this book and that symposium taught me was that perhaps the best writers, for whatever reasons - maybe arrogance, a lack of time for other endeavors, the touch of genius it would be impossible to explain - are not the best people to ask about writing. Perhaps it's the steady craftsmen who should be teaching the craft; I know that's the type I'd want fixing my roof.