Welcome to my inaugural book review of books on writing, the first in a series on the topic of creating prose.

Featured book:

Writers [on Writing]: Collected Essays from The New York Times, Introduction by John Darnton, 2001 Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York. (Vol. 1)

What this book meant to me as a new writer:

If your first experience in writing happened in school, and a comprehensive outline was required, you may suffer the same fear as I did when I began to write. I am a terrible outliner. I wanted to ask someone, do successful authors really complete an outline before they write?

Don’t suffer from the belief you cannot write because outlining doesn’t work for you. I was discouraged and constrained by this impression until a visit to the local library saved me. I searched for a book and found Writers [on Writing]: Collected Essays from the New York Times, filled with words of wisdom from forty-six authors in less than three-hundred pages. Jackpot.

I expected to learn how each author knuckled under to ‘the method.’ You won’t find agreement among these essays on the best time of day, how to organize your thoughts, or whether to write from beginning to end or out of sequence.

Instead, the writers treated me to an enlightening array of ways to encourage stories held within. Their words came to me as conversations with new friends, people with whom I shared a passion, who took the time to share a truth about their writing. Some described technique, others emotion and process, but each gave a fresh view, which led me, and can lead you, to a sense of freedom in writing. They provided many ideas on how to get started, and they freed me from the notion of writing ‘correctly.’

Spend time with this community of authors and glean ideas. Learn. Experiment. Whatever system develops, whatever works for you, do it.

Authors whose essays appear include: E. L. Doctorow, Alice Hoffman, Ken Haruf, David Mamet, Sue Miller, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Sara Paretsky, Annie Proulx, Roxana Robinson, William Saroyan, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Scott Turow, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Alice Walker, Paul West, Elie Wiesel, and twenty-seven others.

A closer look at the book:

My favorite insight in Writers [on Writing] is from Susan Sontag. “What I write about is other than me. As what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. My books know what I once knew – fitfully, intermittently.”

The authors acknowledge the influence of family. Often friends or relatives ask if a work is autobiographical or if a character is based on themselves. How does a writer deal with fears and concerns of family members? Sue Miller says the writer’s job is “to make the territory …universal…It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened…” Roxana Robinson is fascinated by family ties, pointing out, “All this beauty and fury makes the family a rich literary source.”

Carol Chute says, “Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission. Complete submission.”

Paul West emphasizes the importance of imagination, listening to the “complex emanation from the personality.”

A reader once demanded to know from Sara Paretsky, why her stories were “infested” with political issues. This astonished me, because political and social issues are the secret sauce in V.I. Warshawski mysteries. Paretsky says, “I don’t sit down to write books of social or political commentary. Both as a reader and a writer, I’m pulled by stories, not by ideas; I see the world in the stories of the people around me. It’s just that the stories that speak most to me are those of people…who can’t speak for themselves, who feel powerless and voiceless in the larger world.”

The authors comment on all aspects of writing. Joyce Carol Oates suggests, “There must be some analogue between running and dreaming. The dreaming mind is usually bodiless, has peculiar powers of locomotion and, in my experience at least, often runs or glides or ‘flies’ along the ground or in the air.” Whether running or getting up to stretch, movement can trigger the decent into the imagination. I attended a roundtable led by Joyce Carol Oats a few years ago. Eight of us described our novels. We didn’t go for a run, but her questions were like guideposts, ways of thinking to draw the writer forward with the story.

Walter Mosley offers a convincing rationale to write every day: “These ideas have no physical form. They are smoky concepts liable to disappear at the slightest disturbance.”

If there is a theme among the forty-six essays, it is the diversity of approaches to writing. As we develop our techniques and gain experience, we need to allow our methods to change and move with us.

Elie Wiesel passed away at the age of eighty-seven in 2016. He is the author of many books, among them, Night, his witness as a teenager to the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His advice to us: “Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.”

The desire to write comes from a deep place. Break down the doors and write, write, write.