Featured book:

Writers [on Writing]: More Collected Essays from The New York Times; Introduction by Jane Smiley, 2003 Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York (Vol. II).

Last month, in the first installment of this series about books on writing, I reviewed The New York Times initial collection of forty-six essays by noted authors. In the second volume, forty-six additional authors share their views on many aspects of writing.

What this book meant to me as a new writer:

The first volume was a revelation, so I was anxious to dip into the second. I wanted reassurance. Could I write story after story, or would the well run dry? Would my stories be worthy of a reader’s time? I fell prey to many inklings of self-doubt. The essays in the second volume came to me as a series of stern talks, helping me channel my agitation and get to work. I savored each essay as a bit of advice from someone who knew the craft and managed to survive the bumpy ride of introspection and outside expectations.

My writerly life includes a couple of evolving processes. Somewhere along the line, each new work transitions from a disorganized idea to a story. I don’t know when this happens because I don’t realize it in the moment. Later, looking back, I realize I’ve crossed the invisible line from pushing forward in the dark to pulling my story toward a destination still in the murk of imagination. Does this mean I know the ending? No, but I know the theme and the needs of the characters. I move through the story with them, seeking the culmination.

Another process stems from a bad habit. When I am overwhelmed and unable to write, I procrastinate by securing the accoutrements of writing such as reference books, a tri-pod with a flip chart for plot and character sketches, reams of three-hole-punched paper, and pens even though I write on a computer. Trips to the office supply store provide a time-out, a release of tension. But I worry I should use the tension to propel my stories, so please understand, I don’t recommend cluttering your writing space, unless it works for you. Always, do what works for you. I’m trying to curb the urge to forage for new binders and markers, and instead, calm my inner turmoil before I grab my laptop and sink into the world of my story. I’ll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, does anyone need an extra box of paper clips?

A closer look at the book:

Authors whose essays appear in the second volume include: Diane Ackerman, Margaret Atwood, Chitra Divakaruni, Alan Furst, Dorothy Gallagher, Allegra Goodman, A. E. Hotchner, Susan Isaacs, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Honor Moore, Marcia Muller, Ann Patchett, Anna Quindlen, Amy Tan, Frederic Tuten, Edmund White, and twenty-nine others.

Many of the essays stand out, especially for the beginning writer. Margaret Atwood recalls, “It wasn’t the result but the experience that had hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous…Anyone looking might have thought I’d been exposed to some chemical or cosmic ray of the kind that causes rats to become gigantic or men to become invisible.”

The idea of writing as a transformation of the writer can be said of the reader. I love Chitra Divakaruni’s essay. “The novel continuously opens into something larger than the specifics that form the boundaries of the story, though paradoxically these specifics must be concrete and convincing if we are to intimate a larger truth through them. Reading it becomes a three-dimensional experience, beginning in the book and ending in ourselves. Such a novel…is on some level about each one of us, our central truth. Each successful novel gives a special flavor and shape – and tone – to this truth, but does not limit it to these. In this it is similar to the bell, which shapes sound without enclosing it.”

Another favorite essay of mine is Allegra Goodman’s. “There is no better excuse for getting nothing done than to lock yourself in battle with the famous inner demons of self-criticism and doubt. External obstacles have such obvious, prosaic remedies: time can be found, paper purchased.” I stop reading. How does she know I am planning a trip to the office supply store? She continues, “Ultimately every writer must choose between safety and invention.” Her words motivate. “You can look out into the world teeming with stories and cast your net.”

Susan Isaacs’ essay, “Returning to the Character Who Started It All,” describes her frustration at trying and failing to write a second novel after a successful start with Compromising Positions, later made into a movie with Susan Sarandon. Isaacs stopped fretting and started writing after “I recalled what had worked for me the first time: writing the novel I was desperate to read.”

Ann Patchett advises, “Sometimes if there’s a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.”

In her essay, “The Eye of the Reporter, the Heart of the Novelist,” Anna Quindlen writes, “It turned out that when I was writing about the people I actually met and the places I actually went, the enterprise was enshadowed by reader suspicion that we reporters made everything up. But when I made things up as a novelist, readers always suspected I was presenting a thinly disguised version of the facts of my own life…So the facts were assumed to be fiction, and the fiction fact.”

Amy Tan recalls her mother’s secrets divulged by family members in the days leading up to her mother’s death. In this essay of family revelations, Amy learns about her mother from the sisters she discovered later in life. Among the surprises is her mother’s birth name. Tan uses the overthrow of what she thought she knew and, after her mother passes, returns to her draft novel. She tells us, “I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone…I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.”

Frederic Tuten, in a beautiful piece, remembers translating stories for his Italian-speaking grandmother who kept asking, “E poi? And then?” to keep him going. He gives homage to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel with attention to “and then” as an essential tool to move the story forward and bring the reader along.

The essays in the second volume reaffirm the first when it comes to one inviolable tenet for writers: do what works. Develop a method and allow it to grow with you. The rules for writing don’t work in every situation or for every writer. Dig in and write to discover your method.