Customer Reviews

Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Very disappointing. The occassional gem (like Jamaica Kincaid's) brought my review up by one star, but by and large these essays read like tossed-off first drafts. Sure the crafting of each piece was tight--these folks are professionals and the Times is no rag. But they lacked profundity, and why bother writing something that says nothing? More to the point, why read it?

I wanted more--insight, substance, something, anything--from these authors. It wasn't here, but I found it in the Washington Post's version: "The Writing Life" edited by Maria Arana. At 400+ pages deep, that one's worth the price and time.

It's amazing that the more than three dozen writers contributing to "Writers on Writing" managed each to have a different view of the topic at hand. Everyone from Annie Proulx to Jamaica Kincaid to E. L. Doctorow to the late Saul Bellow approaches the act of writing differently, and each has different thoughts to offer. Some of the essays are funny, some are quietly sad, and still others address the dual difficulty and delight of turning out something new and yet universal.

The breadth of thought is amazing, but each of the essays is skillful and thought-provoking. Perhaps my favorite was by Alice Hoffman, who writes, "I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see daylilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed and all that surrounded me was a dark room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible."

In this short passage, she speaks for all the writers here, in saying that writing is a need, not a desire, and that the act is without boundaries and filled with possibility. This is a useful and enriching book for writers, and for those who are simply curious about how writers do what they do.

This book is exactly what it promised to be: a compilation of the essays that the New York Times runs on Mondays under the headline "Writers on Writing." If you've been following the series you won't find any surprises. It's just nice to have everything in one place in more permanent form than a stack of newspaper clippings. If you don't read the New York Times you'll find a collection of essays loosely themed around writing and whatever the author decides to tie it to, by a wide spectrum of writers including, as a random sampling, Saul Bellow, Barbara Kingsolver, Elie Wiesel and Scott Turow. Chances are you're going to find some names in there that aren't familiar. One could wish the editor had included a brief bio on each writer, or at least a list of their titles. Even so, it's an engaging collection.

This is a collection of 46 essays on writing fiction. Each is about four or five pages long and each is by an established author. The authors discuss where they got the ideas for stories, how they approach the tasks, their general feelings on writing, and sometimes they tell us how they became successful. The book has a short introduction by the editor, John Darnton. Overall, the book is excellent.

There are a few bad spots so let us dispense with those first.

I am a fan of Saul Bellow and have read most of his novels. I bought the book - in part - because he was a contributor. So I first read his piece and then read the contribution by John Updike. Both wrote rather disappointingly shallow comments and then each author took the opportunity to peddle a publication. One wonders if they were invited to contribute or if one of their short stories or short essays was simply included by the editor. Perhaps "how they write and what are their ideas" is a question that they are tired of discussing? At that point one wants to throw the book into the wastebasket. But do not give up yet.

By the way, there is a good interview with Saul Bellow in the Paris Review on line and one learns in that interview - free of charge - where he got some of his ideas and how he developed as a writer.

Fortunately for us, the other forty or so contributors took their tasks seriously, or they are not tired of the question.

In any case, the hard facts are that most published authors do not work in isolation and most have some sort of professional training. One of the messages in the book advanced by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and others is that it is a good idea to attend a writers workshop or school. Vonnegut was an instructor in Iowa and he started "Slaughterhouse-Five" while he was there. That is one of the key bits of information in the book. Attending such as course can be a reality check. Some will give up their writing at that point. For others, it can act as a pathway to writing novels.

There are a number of other good ideas in the book and you will discover them as you read. I will mention a few. Nicholas Delbanco has a good piece on great literature and he points out what we can learn from books such as Ulysses. Barbara Kingsolver has a good contribution on writing about sex in a novel. David Mamet has an interesting piece on the genre novel, while Walter Mosely gives tips on making small daily contributions. Scott Turow tells an interesting story about his own career that went from writing to law, and then back again to writing. I enjoyed the piece by Susan Sontag. There are many other interesting essays - too numerous to review and comment on here.

The book is good but you will have to sift through the stories to find the nuggets. Overall I think it deserves 4 or 5 stars and it is worth the price.

Writers on Writing is a mixed bag of essays, edited by journalist John Darnton, that were originally published in the New York Times. The authors of the forty-some pieces that comprise the volume are all celebrated writers (though I confess I was not familiar with all their bylines), a good many of them household names: Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Hoffman and John Updike and Scott Turow and so on. The authors were charged with writing about, well, writing, and they manage to do so, surprisingly enough, without ever stepping on one another's subject matter: each essayist approaches the topic in a manner peculiar to themselves.

Some of the essays, those that had the least to do with the task of writing, left me cold: it is a shame that the collection, which is organized alphabetically by author, begins with a particularly weak contribution. But there are far more worthy essays than not in this volume. Among the most interesting of the lot are Kent Haruf's piece on the peculiar way that some writers, including himself, write, and David Leavitt's fascinating reminiscence of his early insistence on order in the unlikeliest of places: "I didn't like it if there were more songs on one side [of a record] than the other; the songs had to be at least three minutes long, with a title that appeared in neither the first nor the last line. (If the title appeared in both the first and the last line, I would remove the offending album from my shelf.)" Writing, Leavitt explains, was a means for him to impose order on ordinary life. There is, too, a very amusing piece by Ed McBain on crime writing, and David Mamet writes of the joys of genre fiction, and in particular of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series (now a major motion picture!). Readers should find something to like in these pages, and may indeed discover among them a handful of new authors to add to their shelves.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

This is more of a collection of the details of individual authors' lives than of their writing tactics, lessons learned, or other habits, but it does include all of the above. If nothing else, it shows us that writers, even the ones we recognize the names of, are regular people, all of various backgrounds and brought to the "call of writing" by different means.

The various essays help us beginners to remember that we are not starting out with any less advantage than those that have preceeded us...or beat us to publication. There are also useful excerpts from authors' daily lives, showing us how they battle writers' block or just fit in a personal life with their writing life.

All in all, the book takes more of a literary slant than a very down-to-earth and practical one, but that does vary by the included authors. It would've also been nice to have short bios or publishing histories of the authors listed in the book for those that come across as particularly interesting or are unfamiliar to the individual reader. But, we do have Amazon.com for that info., don't we? :)

In high school writing class our teacher used to tell us that one of the most hackneyed and boring types of writing is when writers write about writing. Writers are already the most narcissistic and self-obsessed individuals in the world, and the New York Times has encouraged them to be even more so by asking them to write a personal essay on why and how they write. These essays try to be intimate and inspiring, but they're lame and trivial -- and most surprising of all many are not even well-written.

Forty- six writers speak about the life of the writer. They provide a whole host of interesting observations. Vonnegut tells us that he learned from Aristotle that to write comedy one must write about characters the readers feel superior to. And that to write tragedy there must be one character that the readers feel superior to them. Joyce Carol Oates tells about the strange feeling about living in one of the major cities of the world for a sabbatical year, London, and having her heart and mind in Detroit. Bellow tells about the slightly uneasy feeling of the writer before the neighbors who are always wondering what this guy is doing at home. Elie Weisel talks about how Hasidic story formed his imagination and still lives within him. Each of the writers seems to have his own problems, obsessions and methods. It is almost as if they were saying ' Of course all human beings are individuals, but somehow writers are among the most individual of individuals. A good collection.
One point though. In part because the Paris Reviews are longer, and in part I think because there is someone who asks questions about the work of the writer the Paris Review interviews about writing are richer than these.

In this fascinating book, forty-six writers talk about what they do in forty-six voices worth listening to -- serious essays, whimsical essays, stories, confessions. The book does not provide biographies, although the basic facts of the lives of many are well known, such as John Updike, David Mamet, Saul Bellow and others. Writers On Writing might be of interest to those who have read Eleanor Wachtel's More Writers and Company, which includes bigraphical data and compelling interviews with about two dozen writers, including several who contributed essays to Writers On Writing: Carol Shields, Alice Walker, E. L. Doctorow, Louise Eldrich, Jane Smiley, and Jamaica Kincaid.

I felt in good hands reading the lives of these famous writers. I did not feel so alone anymore. It was good to know that these literary personalities also adopt idiosyncratic postures, dress in creative ways, pick unusual settings, collect dozens of notebooks with the most eccentric designs, meditate, and even go running in order to write. Other things I learned were:
1) The neeed to read in order to write
2)The impact of cinema on writing - cinema has claimed a lot of writing's former glory and influenced its style
3) Sex - the least addressed in literature, yet the most celebrated in life (whether in the act or in the contemplation of it!)
4) Real life is stranger than fiction, and becoming stranger as we hurtle towards the end of days - imagine a man sleeping with an alligator for amorous reasons!
5) Yard sales are good places to pick up ideas
6) You must not let go of a story once you start it - you must write every day
7) Crime novels are political
8) The family is the fount of great drama
9) The dangers of putting real people into books - best to wait until they are dead or mix them up totally that they can never recognize themselves
10) The role of writers groups - to aid with revision and to play the role of the reader - don't expect them to be the fount of new ideas.

There - sounds like a writer's ten commandments!

Shane Joseph www.shanejoseph.comRedemption in Paradise