Writer's Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction [Paperback]

Alan Cheuse (Editor), Lisa Alvarez (Editor), Richard Ford (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2007

Since 1969, the prestigious Squaw Valley Community of Writers has helped develop the art and craft of many who are now household names. Instructors such as Michael Chabon, Mark Childress, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, Robert Stone, and Amy Tan have distilled their advice and wisdom from seminars and lectures, and the result is a book that captures the workshop experience of completesubmersion in the writing process. With an introduction by novelist and short story master Richard Ford, himself a conference attendee in the 1970s, this volume gives the writer and dedicated reader a jolt of inspiration, sharp insight into matters of technique, and a feeling of camaraderie with a writing community.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection from the Squaw Valley writing workshop, one of the oldest in the U.S., boasts an impressive list of alumni among its contributors, including Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Anne Lamott and Mark Childress. Rather than exercises and suggestions, however, this "workshop" is populated with literate, thoughtful essays on different aspects of crafting fiction. Ford's foreward begins with some blunt advice: one "should treat the decision to write like a decision to get married: try to talk yourself out of it if you can." Standouts include James D. Houston's essay on the role of setting, which shapes not just "grounding and location," but "the dreams you dream... your view of history, sometimes your sense of self." Janet Fitch advises a deep plunge into sensual details: "Take a bite of a tangerine... and try to work your way into the place it came from, to a time and a place and a season." A new or struggling writer will get the most out of Lamott's "The Clinic," in which she advises, "write what you want to come upon," what makes "something inside of you... go 'oooh.' " Aside from a few clunkers-Robert Stone's hodge-podge of flourishes among them--writers will find much of these new and previously published essays worthwhile and motivating, perhaps none more so than Tan's essay on "Angst and the Second Book," which first appeared in the pages of PW.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (June 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811858219
• ISBN-13: 978-0811858212
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #737,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ALAN CHEUSE


"The Voice of Books on National Public Radio"--that's how novelist, essayist and story writer Alan Cheuse has been described. For over twenty-five years, Cheuse has been "reading for America" every week on NPR, and he's also been writing a number of books of his own, and teaching the art of narrative and literature at George Mason University for over twenty years.
He is the author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed. His latest novel, To Catch the Lightning (winner of the 2009 Grub Street Prize for Fiction), follows the career of turn of the century photographer Edward S. Curtis and his quest to photograph the western tribes of North America. He is also the author of several collections of short fiction and a pair of novellas published under the title The Fires. He is the co-editor with Nicholas Delbanco of Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Art, and co-author with Delbanco of Literature: Craft & Voice, a major newly published introduction to college literary study, and also the co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction, and editor of Listening to Ourselves: Great American Short Fiction.
Cheuse's essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous places, such as The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other venues. His essay collection, Listening to the Page, appeared in 2001. His collected travel essays came out in June 2009 under the title A Trance After Breakfast.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars You Really Need to be There, July 14, 2007

By 

Howard Goldowsky "ChessWriter" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Writer's Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction (Paperback)

This book is a collection of essays about writing, going back about 15 to 20 years. All of the essays are written by current or former Squaw Valley Workshop teachers or former students. The introduction is by Richard Ford, himself a former student. Given the venerable reputation of the essayists, I expected down-to-earth pragmatic advice on how to achieve better fiction; what I got, instead, with essay titles like "A Note to an Unpublished Writer" and "Fear of Finishing," was something that read like a self-help manual for writers.

There was one exception. Janet Fitch's essay, "Coming to Your Senses" was an outrageously practical essay on how to use unique verbs to describe ordinary perceptions. For example, Fitch writes: "A girl has moist skin, a literal description. If we like her, we can describe it as dewy, slick, glossy. If we don't, it's greasy, sweaty, oily." Fitch's essay is packed with practical technique like this.

The other essays, unfortunately, were more general in nature. A few talked about scene, plot, point of view, but often in generalities and using arcane examples.

Some of the essays were transcribed from actual talks. They read well, but it seems like you had to be there to get the overall effect.

I recommend Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and Stephen King's On Writing for a more practical approach to learning fiction.

All in all, not a bad book, but I was hoping for something more pragmatic.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So you want to be a writer?, July 17, 2007

By 

Daniel Olivas (West Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Writer's Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction (Paperback)

Though scores of summer writing conferences have been established throughout the last several decades, one of the oldest and most respected is the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in Northern California. Founded in 1969 by novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, the Community has sponsored workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and nature writing. For almost forty years, published authors have dispensed hard-earned knowledge about the craft to conference attendees who harbor the dream of someday seeing their names emblazoned across the covers of bestselling novels or story collections.

For the first time, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers shares the wisdom of some of its contemporary staff members. Edited by Lisa Alvarez and Alan Cheuse with an introduction from Richard Ford, Writers Workshop in a Book (Chronicle Books) includes essays on many aspects of fiction writing from eighteen well-published authors. Regardless of whether reading this book will inspire a beginning writer to commence or finish a full-length manuscript, it is a fine and truly entertaining addition to the ever-growing bookshelf of "how to" tomes.

In the first essay, "How to Write a Novel," Diane Johnson informs us that "most people in their lives think at one time or another of writing" a novel. Indeed, she read somewhere that "90 percent of college-educated women, at one stage or another of their lives, actually begin one." Of course, very few actually get around to writing a novel because there are many obstacles including the fact that "it's an awful lot of work." But if you are willing to put in the time, Johnson offers very practical threshold decisions you must make before moving forward: "First you have to plan it. What will happen in it? Who will tell it?" Johnson identifies and explains the "[s]mall and large choices" you must make as you plot out your novel. Her advice is sound, honest, to the point, and decidedly unromantic.

Alan Cheuse's piece is as wonderfully audacious as its title promises: "'Here's Lookin' at You, Kid': A Brief History of Point of View." Cheuse notes that with movies, there is essentially one point of view which "employ[s] the simple equation of camera lens and eye of the audience member, or the so-called God-like point of view." Literature, of course, has offered through the millennia many more options for POV. In examining the history of the point of view in literature, Cheuse begins with ancient Greek epic and then moves to biblical authors and then Chaucer, Dante, Herodotus, Cervantes, up through the ages to such writers as Joyce, García Márquez, Rhys and Atwood. All the while, Cheuse dissects how these authors used POV in their works and cautions that "[m]ost new writers slip and slide between third-person subjective and the general..." This essay is quite a heady (and fun) ride.

Some of the essays consist of war stories which are entertaining but also offer their own lessons. For example, Amy Tan recounts in "Angst and the Second Book" how after the publication of her wildly successful first novel, she was confronted with the similarly wildly high expectations for her, as yet, unwritten next novel. One writer told her that the second effort was "doomed no matter what you do." Why? Critics will complain that "it is too much like the first," and readers will complain "that it is too different." Tan's battles with self doubt and doomsayers are comforting in some ways because she lets us know that bestselling authors must do what beginning writers do: persevere despite the multitude of reasons to give up and move to something more practical.

The essays run from the basics to the spiritual. Sands Hall and Al Young dig into the nitty-gritty of scene construction, dialogue, theme, voice and language. Anne Lamott and Louis B. Jones plumb the mysteries of writing. Other pieces recount the rather odd convergence of circumstances that resulted in the writing of a first novel (Michael Chabon), or the fear of finishing a novel (Mark Childress). These and the other essays make one realize that such a book could not be dedicated to other professional pursuits such as the law or operating a chain of restaurants. Creating fiction is, indeed, a singular way of life.

Though one of the editors of Writers Workshop in a Book is Latina, there is not one essay by a Latino writer. But this likely will change in future editions based on the upcoming Squaw Valley faculty members and guest speakers that include Dagoberto Gilb, Michael Jaime-Becerra and Alex Espinoza. Such authors could delve into their use of "code switching" (moving from English to another language and back again) in a way that allows their characters to ring true while not leaving behind those readers who do not speak Spanish. Also missing is any meaningful discussion of the publishing industry's often ham-handed approach to writers of color. Despite these omissions, Cheuse and Alvarez have brought together fascinating, instructive and meaningful advice from some of our finest contemporary writers.

[This review first appeared in La Bloga.]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Writer's Workshop in a Book, May 24, 2011

By 

M J Henry - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Writer's Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction (Paperback)

This is a good collection of essays written by published writers. The essays provide advice and tips to assist the writer in a variety of areas.