How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience

by Hilton Obenzinger, Charles Junkerman (Introduction)

How We The Varieties of Writing Experience is based on the series of “How I Write” public conversations with faculty and other advanced writers conducted by Hilton Obenzinger at Stanford University since 2002. These conversations explored the nuts and bolts, pleasures and pains, of all types of writing. “How I Write” conversations were informal, with no pretense of plumbing the depths of anyone’s scholarly expertise or art, although much was revealed. Rather, these talks probed what the writing part of these scholars’ and artists’ work entailed—whether their field was physics or anthropology or fiction—in an easygoing fashion. Participants included such authors as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson and historian David Kennedy, physicist Leonard Susskind, poets Evan Boland, Gwyneth Lewis, and Diane di Prima, literary critics and biographers Arnold Rampersad and Diane Middlebrook, novelists Abraham Verghese, Valerie Miner and Irvin Yalom, playwrights David Henry Hwang and Amy Freed, philosopher Richard Rorty, historian Ian Morris, environmental scientist Terry Root, cultural critic Rebecca Solnit, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. The chapters of How We Write follow the major line of topics that came up in the Chapter One, the different ways people learned how to write; Chapter Two, their attitudes and feelings toward writing and what motivates them; Chapter Three, what happens when a writer gets blocked; Chapter Four, the different ways people work—their physical environment and how they handle time, relationships, and more; Chapter Five, how writers get ideas and how they launch into a project; Chapter Six, the ways writers fashion arguments or create ideas, images, and stories; Chapter Seven, how style is driven by field or genre; Chapter Eight, how research connects to style; Chapter Nine, the different approaches writers employ to revise their work; and Chapter Ten, a final reflection. How We The Varieties of Writing Experience is not a textbook or a handbook on how to become a writer. It’s primarily a conversation, a medley of voices celebrating a craft that delights and dismays each of us, and a conversation the reader is invited to join.

Genres: Writing

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 2015

Reviews

[Meredith Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience by Hilton Obenzinger, is based on many years of Obenzinger's interviews with people through the "How I Write" Project at Stanford University. I had assumed that this would be interesting comments from poets and fiction writers on their process, and indeed they appear in the book. I especially enjoyed a wonderful passage about David Henry Hwang's process of structuring his famous play M. Butterfly-- how an idea took form as a drama.

But perhaps what I liked best here were the other writers--the scholars and professors. Writing is– why don't we think more about this?– an essential part of many, many professions. For scholars, as for so-called creative writers, a great deal is explored and discovered in the process of writing. Included here are writers from the social sciences, but also from the hard sciences, in which visuals like graphs and charts become the backbone of an article, and words are mostly used to link the parts. Data, in other words, is the structuring element of the piece of writing.

How We Write also has, along with excellent examples of the great variety of processes of writing among various people, an interesting subplot, as it were, about the tensions for scholars between writing articles acceptable to the scientific world of journals and other scholars and the desire to share their insights and writing with lay people. There is, according to several of these writers, a danger of being "Saganized," which is having your career taken less than seriously in your profession (as apparently happened to astronomer Carl Sagan) if you become a popularizer. Claude Steele, who named "stereotype anxiety" (the destructive socio-psychological force that can trammel members of racial and gender minorities), talks well about the division between the experiments and research in his work and how he gets his work out to the public.

Generally, Obenzinger himself takes a back seat here, featuring his admirable and delightful guests at what must have been a terrific series of live interviews. He is himself, of course, an accomplished and excellent writer (see my review of his memoir Busy Dying ), and there are a number of hints of techniques he has developed in his teaching of writing to all kinds of students, including a passage on editing out over-used words that is really about how the over-used words are part of the process of thinking through writing.

This is an exciting and useful book for teachers of writing and anyone who writes. You'll dip into it often to refresh your thoughts about one of the most deeply human ways of exploring and sharing experience