Book Review - Writers on Writing, Volume II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times - Introduction by Jane Smiley

One of the best books I have read about writing is Volume II of “Writers On Writing,” collected essays from the New York Times, with an introduction by Jane Smiley. Many of my favorite writers, as well as some unfamiliar to me, are included.  For writers, the essays are a kind of primer on the craft, providing an endless variety of processes and approaches that are both instructive and liberating. As a reader, they are pure joy – to simply revel in the beauty and power of the written word at its best. Here are some examples:

Margaret Atwood describes how she became a writer this way: “It simply happened, suddenly, in 1956, while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that, writing was the only thing I wanted to do.”

Here is Geraldine Brooks defending the historical novel against Henry James’s criticism that it was useless to write about things that happened more than fifty years earlier because ‘half the things that make our modern world were nonexistent.’   “So what if my 1666 heroine lacked ‘half the things that make our modern world?’ Henry James was wrong to imply that consciousness – the soul - is shaped by things. It is shaped, surely, by emotions and by the way emotions lead one human being to deal with another. And these emotions – fear, depression, love, exhilaration, the desire to live and to see your children live – these I do not think my seventeenth-century woman experienced any differently in her tiny village than I do in mine.”

Alan Cheuse writes about reading like a writer: “…you can’t write seriously without reading the greats in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of the language, to the technical turns and twists of scene making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates.”

In her piece, Dorothy Gallagher examines the essence of what a writer must do.   “The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. There really is no choice. A reporter of fact is in service to the facts, a eulogist to the family of the dead, but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims.”

Finally, Ann Patchett writes about the numbing procrastination with which all writers can relate. “Despite the hand-wringing and the overdrive of unnecessary productivity, there will come point very soon when I will begin, if for no other reason than the stress of not beginning will finally overwhelm me. That, and I’ll want to see how the whole thing ends. Sometimes if there’s a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.”

If you want to be inspired by more of these gems, read this book! JB