Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop

by Paul West

The acclaimed novelist and author of The Secret Life of Words re-creates his last writing seminar in which fifteen students reflect on the art of writing great fiction as they discuss one another's work and shares their insights into the creative writing process. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Writing

272 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2001

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


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Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not that it was a bad thing, but no matter how you look at it this was a tough read. Paul West writes in a style that is meant to challenge even the most enlightened audience. Reading should be every bit of an intellectual exercise as writing, and this book will confound and frustrate anyone who does not like to be forced into thinking.

I picked up Master Class on a whim, perhaps I was feeling inquisitive that day, but I didn’t know what to expect, so I came at it with an open mind which ended up being crucial. This book is not meant for someone looking for a series of techniques that they can use to improve their writing. Paul mentions that creativity isn’t a laundry list, you can’t follow a formula and come up with something meaningful. Instead lessons come in oblique angles forcing the reader to search for more esoteric messages.

“There are undergraduates who would love to have such a list of requirements or inducements because, they’d expect, it would somehow match something they were to be examined on. Chances, however, would be that I’d examine them on something wholly inapposite - Milton’s use of proper names, say, or paraphrases in Dickens. I gave up teaching undergrads when I realized I was teaching grammar, not creativity.”

I have to admit that I don’t posses the literary knowledge to follow most of his references obscuring many of his points from my view. It does seem that he has a difficult time relating to people who do not posses his knowledge and experience which makes his writing a little inaccessible, and I can sympathise with others who find this off-putting and pretentious.

“The same happens as before. They write it down with an almost creative relish, whereas I, who seem to have had most of these commandments by heart for at least some of my career, can hardly imagine the state of mind that sees them as discoveries.”

I don’t fault Paul for this, and I would never ask him to water anything down for my sake. I recognize that I’m meeting someone who is striving to reach the loftiest heights of literature, and along the way is attempting to lift others up into the same rarefied air.

I do fear however that I would be eaten alive in his seminar: I’m not sure if he would give me the time-of-day. Even so there’s something about his tone that makes me feel Paul isn’t trying to put me down, but instead attempting to lift me up else I fade into the distance and become another page-turning subway reader.

“Then do read Helena,” I tell her with my most noble smile, my mind on something that has long bothered me: that people, avid for opinion and bloated with knowledge, spend so much of their lives small-talking about life that they never create any thing to be left behind them, and their lives end up a sluice of cliches, street-smarts, and anecdote.

He wouldn’t say that if he felt the reader couldn’t respond to such a bold statement: otherwise he’s just senile. I thank him for his generosity, and instead of being offended I take this chance to realize I have miles yet to go.

There’s an unfortunate fatalist tone to his work. Paul mentions a few times the battles he’s had with publishers and the decline he’s witnessed in the industry. He ponders whether it’s right for him to push his students into writing novels that won’t produce best sellers; he’s fully aware that the inquisitive thought provoking style he fosters doesn’t sell.

For Paul the future is uncertain, but for me all I can do is be thankful that there are still people like him in the world who hold writing to the highest standards continually molding prose into works of art.

“And then it comes over me again, the ravaging sense that all I am doing is grooming these brave souls for the plank: walking it. The better they write, the worse their fate will be in a world in which all bad writers write alike the same corrugated cardboard prose without even thinking about it.”

. . .

"If there's a battle of the books, it was over long ago with the arrival onstage of a huge skim-reading public that cares no more about sentences than about how an ostrich wipes its rear. These are the condom readers, I suppose, to be seen at airports and on planes, racing ahead through their page-turners to a destiny as illusory as the one at the end of their 500-miles-an-hour charge."

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read a lot of books dedicated to writing fiction. Out of all of them, this was by far the least useful. There is nothing here that will help people write better. The book is much more focused on the personalities and personal discussions that West's students had rather than anything resembling writing instruction. Even if your goal is to read 100 books about writing, skip this one.

[Amy Ballard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah, I quit in the middle. I gained one useful joke and one useful vocab word in the process of yawning through the first few chapters. Read something more down-to-earth, like On Writing Well. There are lots of great books on fiction writing. Don't depress yourself by trying to read this. Condescending.

[Sebastian Cosgrove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good insight, and helped me alot.

[Geoff Young · Rating 1 out of 5]

The pomposity-to-utility ratio is dizzyingly high, with the first 60 pages containing a dazzling array of fancy words (some italicized) cobbled together into meaningless sentences. Perhaps the situation improves later, but if a writing instructor can't get to the point in the first quarter of a book, then maybe the appropriate lesson to learn from the experience of having plowed through those 60 pages is that sometimes it's best to just walk away.

[Jill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was pretty disappointed in this. Maybe I didn't understand, but really... I just didn't get any reason WHY I should read this book.