What do you think?
Rate this book
The Best Writing on Writing
Book by
209 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1994
3 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 24, 2019
An aged, not super charming collection of essays on writing. I'd love the series idea and could see a 2019 version, but I'd steer clear of this one.
September 29, 2019
Maybe I'm naive but I think this might actually be the best writing on writing.
December 12, 2020
get it for diane lefer.
March 6, 2014
This collection of essays from 1993 by poets, writers, and academics offers a rich variety of criticism and meditations on the art of writing.
I confess to skipping a few of the essays in the book (mostly the drier academic ones like Adrienne Rich's "Someone is Writing a Poem" or Carolyn G. Heilbrun's "Women and Biography"). The most accessible essays were from literary magazines and newspapers: Donald Hall's "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality" for the New York Times Book Review, or the funny "The Screenwriter's Lexicon" by David Freeman from The New Yorker. Another I especially enjoyed was "Mistakes People Make About Poetry" by James Fenton.
There's a fair amount of pretentious fluff, but you may find a few gems here about the slippery, hard-to-describe craft of writing. There are many, many wonderful essay collections out there for fans of the genre. Two of my favorites are A Passion for Books edited by Harold Rabinowitz, and the The Best American Essays of the Century , edited by Joyce Carol Oates
So Quotable:
"Depressed over my probable brevity, I find my reading mocked by my own acquisitiveness. Part of my pleasure in reading has always been pride in accumulation. I read to use what I read, for understanding and for writing; take away that future use and my reading mocks me: if I am not to live more than a wretched year or two, what am I reading for? I should be able to read for the joy of a book's beauty but I cannot." - Donald Hall, "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality"
"The impulse, at least for someone of the writerly persuasion, is not to bemoan this condition but to remark it in detail. Initially, one's motives for translating happenstance into acts of language may be quite private. Catastrophe tends to be composed not of a monolithic event but of a welter of little incidents, many of which bear no apparent relationship to one another, and language, in ordering these into recognizable patterns, counteracts disorientation and disintegration. This process of making sense of a flood of random data also produces the impression - generally quite groundless - of control, which may save one's sanity even though it can't save one's own or anyone else's life." - Nancy Mairs, "The Literature of Personal Disaster"
"Womjep: A woman in jeopardy; sometimes called femjep. It's a hardy perennial among movie plots, from 'The Perils of Pauline' to 'Slumber Party Massacre.' The fems in jep were once beautiful and helpless and had torn clothes. They're still beautiful, but now they're often surgeonsor architects in torn clothes." - David Freeman, "The Screenwriter's Lexicon"
"The bottom line on character invention: people in fiction must have intelligible, supportable reasons for what they do and say, which is possible only if their behavior is motivated by factors a reader can understand and verify from evidence in the story. Unlike flesh-and-blood humans, story personae, however weird, must behave in ways that make some kind of sense; if they don't, their 'mystery' stays unsolved, unsolvable, pointless." - Ben Nyberg, "Why Stories Fail"
I confess to skipping a few of the essays in the book (mostly the drier academic ones like Adrienne Rich's "Someone is Writing a Poem" or Carolyn G. Heilbrun's "Women and Biography"). The most accessible essays were from literary magazines and newspapers: Donald Hall's "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality" for the New York Times Book Review, or the funny "The Screenwriter's Lexicon" by David Freeman from The New Yorker. Another I especially enjoyed was "Mistakes People Make About Poetry" by James Fenton.
There's a fair amount of pretentious fluff, but you may find a few gems here about the slippery, hard-to-describe craft of writing. There are many, many wonderful essay collections out there for fans of the genre. Two of my favorites are A Passion for Books edited by Harold Rabinowitz, and the The Best American Essays of the Century , edited by Joyce Carol Oates
So Quotable:
"Depressed over my probable brevity, I find my reading mocked by my own acquisitiveness. Part of my pleasure in reading has always been pride in accumulation. I read to use what I read, for understanding and for writing; take away that future use and my reading mocks me: if I am not to live more than a wretched year or two, what am I reading for? I should be able to read for the joy of a book's beauty but I cannot." - Donald Hall, "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality"
"The impulse, at least for someone of the writerly persuasion, is not to bemoan this condition but to remark it in detail. Initially, one's motives for translating happenstance into acts of language may be quite private. Catastrophe tends to be composed not of a monolithic event but of a welter of little incidents, many of which bear no apparent relationship to one another, and language, in ordering these into recognizable patterns, counteracts disorientation and disintegration. This process of making sense of a flood of random data also produces the impression - generally quite groundless - of control, which may save one's sanity even though it can't save one's own or anyone else's life." - Nancy Mairs, "The Literature of Personal Disaster"
"Womjep: A woman in jeopardy; sometimes called femjep. It's a hardy perennial among movie plots, from 'The Perils of Pauline' to 'Slumber Party Massacre.' The fems in jep were once beautiful and helpless and had torn clothes. They're still beautiful, but now they're often surgeonsor architects in torn clothes." - David Freeman, "The Screenwriter's Lexicon"
"The bottom line on character invention: people in fiction must have intelligible, supportable reasons for what they do and say, which is possible only if their behavior is motivated by factors a reader can understand and verify from evidence in the story. Unlike flesh-and-blood humans, story personae, however weird, must behave in ways that make some kind of sense; if they don't, their 'mystery' stays unsolved, unsolvable, pointless." - Ben Nyberg, "Why Stories Fail"
February 16, 2008
As you can see for yourself, the cover design was definitely not this book's main draw. The book had, in fact, been in my collection for over 5 years in the reference section without being referred to once before I actually sat down to read it cover-to-cover.
This collection was compiled in 1993, and is fairly broad in scope, with essays on, well, you can read the cover. I understandably found the essays on story writing especially useful, with Margot Livesey's How to Tell a True Story, Ben Nyberg's Why Stories Fail, and Diane Lefer's Breaking the Rules of Story Structure getting the most pencil markings, always a sign I'm paying attention.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I was disappointed with the essays by authors whose work I know best. Allan Gurganus and Donald Hall's essays were both effusive, self-indulgent, and not at all edifying, while the best part of Adrienne Rich's essay was the quote by Guy Debord that began it. It reminded me of a writing symposium back in college, when I looked forward all winter to meeting Bobbie Ann Mason only to be bored to tears with her stuttering and rambling; at that same symposium, though, I discovered a true writer/teacher in Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Paradise of Bombs, which youve undoubtedly not read, but should.
So I guess what this book and that symposium taught me was that perhaps the best writers, for whatever reasons - maybe arrogance, a lack of time for other endeavors, the touch of genius it would be impossible to explain - are not the best people to ask about writing. Perhaps it's the steady craftsmen who should be teaching the craft; I know that's the type I'd want fixing my roof.
This collection was compiled in 1993, and is fairly broad in scope, with essays on, well, you can read the cover. I understandably found the essays on story writing especially useful, with Margot Livesey's How to Tell a True Story, Ben Nyberg's Why Stories Fail, and Diane Lefer's Breaking the Rules of Story Structure getting the most pencil markings, always a sign I'm paying attention.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I was disappointed with the essays by authors whose work I know best. Allan Gurganus and Donald Hall's essays were both effusive, self-indulgent, and not at all edifying, while the best part of Adrienne Rich's essay was the quote by Guy Debord that began it. It reminded me of a writing symposium back in college, when I looked forward all winter to meeting Bobbie Ann Mason only to be bored to tears with her stuttering and rambling; at that same symposium, though, I discovered a true writer/teacher in Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Paradise of Bombs, which youve undoubtedly not read, but should.
So I guess what this book and that symposium taught me was that perhaps the best writers, for whatever reasons - maybe arrogance, a lack of time for other endeavors, the touch of genius it would be impossible to explain - are not the best people to ask about writing. Perhaps it's the steady craftsmen who should be teaching the craft; I know that's the type I'd want fixing my roof.
May 18, 2013
I was underwhelmed, even though I'm quite interested in the topic. My favorite three stories were: "Letter to a Young Article Writer" (Donald M. Murray), "Lessons of a Lifetime" (James Michener), and "Why Stories Fail" (Ben Nyberg). These were among the most practical and direct. Michener extolls a bias toward action... "first, learn to master the English sentence in all its richness of expression and variation in structure... Second, acquire an individualized vocabulary on at least three social levels, including modern street lingo... Third, familiarize yourself with the fine books that have already been published... I was classically trained... Fourth, use every device in the repertory to get to know people in the publishing business." He continues to talk about how easy it was to get published in his day relative to now.
February 16, 2016
Essays on writing from the early 1990s. Most stand the test of time very well. I recommend on a day for keeping your writing dreams alive!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews