The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop [Hardcover]

Frank Conroy (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 1999

One of the Oldest and most distinguished writing programs in the nation, the Iowa Writers' Workshop has produced some of the greatest American writers of this century. Now for the first time, director Frank Conroy gathers together essays on writing from 25 of the workshop's celebrated faculty and students. Contributors include Charles D'Ambrosio, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ethan Canin, Justin Cronin, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Tom Grimes, Doris Grumbach, Barry Hannah, James Hynes, William Lashner, Margot Livesey, Elizabeth McCracken, Chris Offut, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Power, Francine Prose, James Salter, Scott Spencer, Marilynne Robinson, Abraham Verghese, and Geoffrey Wolff. An eclectic mix of essays on both craft and living the writing life, The Eleventh Draft is essential reading on writing from the best in the business.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For The Eleventh Draft, Frank Conroy solicited essays about writing from 23 fiction writers--all of them one-time Iowa Writers' Workshop students or faculty members. "My instructions to them," says Conroy, "were deliberately vague.... Leaving it open seemed to me to heighten the chances of getting the strongest and least predictable work." Conroy guessed right. Beyond the shared sentiment that writing is hard work, there is, blessedly, no common thread here. For T. Coraghessan Boyle, writing is an addiction as powerful as "putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm." James Hynes claims that writing takes such a toll that "just writing this essay is probably as bad for me as a pack of cigarettes." And Barry Hannah describes writers as "not always the most vital people in the room, but often nearer ghouls sniffing at the trough of other living blood." In the book's most pessimistic piece, Doris Grumbach maligns word processors for destroying the richness of the English language, megabestsellers for the decimation of forests, and the notion of writer-as-celebrity (lionization, she says, does not advance one's writing).

Most of this book's contributors aim, often by way of story, to get at the mysterious heart of the fiction writer's experience. Fred G. Leebron recalls the moment he realized that the characters take the author by the hand, and not vice versa. Elizabeth McCracken confesses to having no inner or outer life, but to stealing all her material from her family. And Scott Spencer underscores the courage needed to create fiction. "A writer who will not risk hurting someone's feelings," he says, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." --Jane Steinberg

From Publishers Weekly

Pity the poor writer anthologized alongside Barry Hannah. There is much to commend in the 22 other contributions to this collection by writers who've taught at Iowa, including Margot Livesey, Francine Prose, James McPherson and Deborah Eisenberg. But few write such startling sentences as this whiplash-inducing hairpin turn from "Mr. Brain, He Want a Song," a meditation on the writing process: "Mr. Brain, he sick of sickness. He want a song, Jack. May I suggest that writing itself is freedom from consciousness as much as stimulant to it." Other highlights include Doris Grumbach's charming, if curmudgeonly, essays on her own beginnings as a writer and as a teacher, and grumblings about the publishing industry and celebrity authors: "It might help the level of prose if they would stop 'appearing' and performing and become the private persons their craft requires them to be." Scott Spencer expresses disappointment with his students' carefulness, their fear of embarrassing themselves. A writer unwilling to express potentially risky and humiliating and hurtful truths, he warns, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." A few of these essays stray into dry, vague disquisitions on the act of writing, highlighting the shortcomings of any such book: the process of writing is nearly always less interesting than what the process produces. Still, a compelling account of a writer's thinking, such as Abraham Verghese's eloquent and heartfelt "Cowpaths," drawing elegant connections between his work as a physician and his work as a writer, is a fine addition to any canon of literature. Never pompous, never dull, he closes his essay with the plainest, most inarguable truth: "That is why I write: because I still find comfort in words, because I find safety in the structures one can build from words, and because it is only by writing that I discover exactly what it is I am thinking." (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 235 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (August 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062736396
• ISBN-13: 978-0062736390
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Worthwhile Read for Prose Writers, October 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Hardcover)

A compilation of essays from former students and teachers of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, editor Frank Conroy's book The Eleventh Draft attempts to capture the essence of the writer's life. "These essays," Conroy notes in the introduction, "are written by people who struggle with both the visible and invisible realities of language every day of their lives." Consequently, authors including Stuart Dybek, Elizabeth McCracken, and Barry Hannah reflect on the unique nature of their profession. The tone varies wildly; while authors such as William Lashner and Justin Cronin write in a deeply personal manner, Scott Spencer and James Alan McPherson give more detached, less introspective observations. This variance renders some essays less affecting than others, but most are engaging, thoughtful pieces. Despite such a lofty goal this book is an overall success, a testament to Conroy's faith in his selected writers (evidenced in his "deliberately vague" instructions for each contributing author) as well as the authors' individual talents. Those looking for pragmatic tips should look elsewhere. However, prose writers seeking both inspiration and insight should find this book both valuable and enjoyable.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Charming, May 8, 2000

By 

Lisa Schweitzer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Hardcover)

Elizabeth McCracken, Stuart Dybek, and Tom Grimes deliver the best here (in my opinion), but the other essays are worth reading. There is throughout the book a shared love of writing--even at its most frustrating and formdible. The title, The Eleventh Draft, is a gentle nudge to the rest of us that God is in the revisions; that no one--not even the best (and these writers are good)--writes easily or quickly, and that the process of writing is just as meaningful as the result (even if nobody ever sees your 11th draft but you). :-)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Writing Life, March 15, 2009

By 

Professional Psychic "www.ilovemypsychic.com" (CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Hardcover)

I got this book because I'm a T.C. Boyle fan and wanted to know about his background.

However, I find myself drawn to a very amusing piece from writer William Lashner, who vividly portrays the difference from the writer's life he expected and the one he actually lives.

We meet him in his first "run" at sport fishing: "...my muscles ripping off the elbow, my feet slipping in the blood, my seasick patch shaking loose. Through it all one thought kept hammering at my skull: Hemingway was a jerk."

It builds from there as he shares his path to the Iowa Writers Workshop:

"So I'm sitting home, alone, watching reruns of "F-Troop," when a voice comes out of my television and asks if I'm desperate for a change. Of course I am desperate for a change. Who watching reruns of "F-Troop" isn't desperate for a change?"

He takes us into his experience with the page and how it transforms over time. He discoveres that once he's abut 100 pages into writing a novel, something changes. That's when the novel's voice takes over. "I have to slog a bit, waiting for the manuscript to start whispering in my ear."

"When I start, it is an act of faith, hoping it will come, not certain that it will but certain that if I don't begin it won't ever....it brings with it not merely its own voice but an entire world, the world of my fiction."

Lashner had expected summers on Sidney Sheldon's yacht, great applause, cruise wear. And what he got was a relationship.

"I haven't given up all aspirations to the glorious fun I had lusted for as a boy. I remember reading how Fitzgerald and Faulkner prostituted themselves to Hollywood and my first thought was, 'How about me?'"

This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.