Customer Reviews

On Teaching and Writing Fiction

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Wallace Stegner was known during his lifetime as one of the greatest teachers of creative writing. As the founder of the creative writing graduate program at Stanford, he taught some of today's best known writers. This slim volume compiles some of his essays and interviews that illuminate his views about what it takes to be a fiction writer - and what it takes to instruct one. The book, however, is probably more useful to aspiring fiction writers than to teachers.

"Fiction: A Lens on Life" offers Stegner's philosophy about what serious fiction should aim to be. "Creative Writing" discusses the use of language, insight, sensory description, layered significance, and point of view - all supported with examples from literature. In "On the Teaching of Creative Writing", the reader is treated to a lively interview conducted at Dartmouth College when Stegner was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow. "To a Young Writer" is perhaps the least interesting of the group - a somewhat condescending "letter" about what fiction writers must face in a hostile world. The most practical chapter is "A Note on Technique", four pages of basic rules that a fiction writer would do well to master.

While this book cannot be called a true how-to book, the lessons it offers are well worth considering for those who are, or who hope to be, in the writing profession.

Simple. Elegant. Potent. This thin paperback is a Master-Class on the Creative Writer. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author harnesses both his Socratic teaching philosophy and his obvious understanding of the literary modus operandi to pass on his knowledge of what the creative writer is and, more importantly, what he or she does on the page. From caveats of the craft to criticism of critics and on to methods of cultivating one's own potential as an Artist, this collection of essays and letters is, at the same time, a love letter to creative writing, an invaluable guide to those new to the art form, an informative advisory to those looking to teach it, and a humbling reminder of the essential tools needed for those craftsmen and craftswomen already sawing, nailing, and sanding their own literary projects.

Many thanks to Lynn Stegner for taking the time needed to compile and publish the collection and, of course, many thanks to Mr. Stegner himself for having taken the time to compose it in the first place.

And to any and everyone who picks up a copy...enjoy!

This is a thin volume on writing (more than teaching) fiction from a great American author and someone who helped pioneer the modern fiction workshop by running the Stanford creative writing department for many years. This book probably won't help beginning writers as much as other how-to books on fiction writing. The chapter with the most practical advice on mechanics is only four pages long, with much of the advice simply listed whereas other writing books might spend entire chapters on each point. But these are things that anyone would learn in any beginning fiction class, and Stegner concerns himself with larger issues. Among those, how to deal with the pressures of publication, questions of audience, point-of-view, and putting what is said before how it is said. There's a lot of wisdom packed into this small book. You'll find yourself using your highlighter often.

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Reviewed by C J Singh (Berkeley, California)
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In her foreword, novelist Lynn Stegner writes: "Wallace Stegner, with a less than a handful of others, essentially invented creative writing as a field of study within the Academy, and from the 1940s on, similar, frequently imitative, programs sprang all over the country." In 1945, he founded and directed the Stanford Writing Program.

In 1930, the University of Iowa pioneered an M.A. degree program with an option to submit as thesis poems or stories or a novel excerpt. Wallace Stegner: "If I was not the first creative M.A. in the country, I was one of the first two or three." In the opening chapters, Stegner quotes brilliant excerpts from the writings of Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway among others in support of his advice for beginners: "A creative writer not only perceives in images, he must communicate in them, and the reader must read in them. They are both source and method."

The third chapter, "On the Teaching of Creative Writing," comprises lively tape-recorded discussions with visiting author Ishmael Reed and others before a Dartmouth College audience in 1980. Stegner holds that writing workshops "that jelled properly, I have seen people write better than they really know how to. The trick is to keep the competiveness friendly, to see to it that individual success stimulates other members of the group, instead of depressing and discouraging them" (p. 63).

What are Stegner's views on reviewers and critics? In the chapter "Writer's Audience," he says:
"I share Chekhov's feeling that a novelist seldom learns anything from a critic and that critics are the flies that keep the horse from plowing. Some critics seem to me to earn Hemingway's definition as the lice that crawl on the body of literature. Nevertheless, in the total literary ecology they have a function, and one would feel less like calling the pest control man and having them sprayed if they really performed that function" (p. 88).

The concluding chapter presents his short story "Goin' to Town," chosen "because it is simple and undevious and unambiguous. I know what experience it comes from, I know what's in it, I know why I wrote it, I know what I got out of writing it" (p.98). The story, narrated in third person point of view, is about an eight-year-old boy growing up on an isolated farm, helping his father start the car to drive to the Fourth of July celebration in the far away town. Despite their several attempts, including hitching the horses to the car's axle, the father fails. In anger he smacks the boy on the head. The boy runs, wailing, to seek solace from his mother.

"Most readers would assume, correctly, that this story reflects an experience of the author himself. . . .I was entering on a course of self-therapy, which is at least as difficult as the hired kind. As it turned out, this story didn't do the job. Even the long novel `The Big Rock Candy Mountain,' which contains a half dozen episodes of this kind, didn't do it. I had to come back years later with another novel, `Recapitulation,' before the past seemed to me healed" (pp. 114-15).

Stegner's brief book on fiction writing is a gem.

It's good. I knew that when I ordered it. Video review? You guys have got to be kidding...get a grip.