Forum / Writing About Writing Group Challenge

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    Gloria Garfunkel
    Jan 15, 02:14pm

    Name your best, favorite, most useful book(s) about writing. I just dumped about half of mine, deciding they were too wordy to be good. What makes a good book on writing? Are there any? I'm still trying to decide that for myself.

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    Gloria Garfunkel
    Jan 15, 03:42pm

    Or are there no good books on writing?

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    Marcus Speh
    Jan 15, 06:03pm

    Great question, Gloria!

    —John Gardner, Art of Fiction — http://bit.ly/TYjByv
    —Dorothea Brande, Becoming a writer — http://bit.ly/XBaWBE
    —Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners — http://bit.ly/XBaMKE
    —Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? — http://bit.ly/XBilRr
    —Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse — http://bit.ly/RYeC13
    —Margarete Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead — http://bit.ly/TYkl6R
    —Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft — http://bit.ly/XBbuaM

    These are all brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, craft- and life-changing books. I can read them again and again.

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    Marcus Speh
    Jan 15, 06:27pm

    ...I could serve up some quotes from these books which would make it clear quickly why I love them—in fact, I do so often on my blog.

    What makes a good book on writing I think is a sense of honesty and a no-bullshit attitude that you usually only get from the best (Brande is an exception above, she was a teacher rather than a writer) who themselves write not to please or for success alone.

    Brande and Le Guin are practical more than visionary. The others are visionary though Gardner has some exercises (his book has two parts the second one is about craft), too.

    I can never stop thinking or working on questions of craft: to me there are more unanswered than answered questions left, and the longer I write the more questions come up (not necessarily altogether new ones but at a different depth of understanding). The questions get harder and harder. I read these books so often (the only one missing is E M Forster's The Art of the Novel) and I get something new from them every time I do.

    I can never stop working on vision either. Why we write, how we do it, whom we write for, etc. are more questions that I find endlessly fascinating—and distracting, too. I expect more and more of my thoughts and answers will somehow wander into my fiction (hopefully not turning it into drivel).

    Case in point: whenever I post a writing issue/question on my blog, I get dozens of comments and many, many more hits than when I post anything else. Same here on Fictionaut in the forums.

    This quote by Flannery O'Connor (from the book that I mentioned) beautifully expresses the writer's need to reflect (and in which spirit):

    «A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. [...] The writer has to judge himself with a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak.»

    —all serious writers I think are aware of this need, of this responsibility towards the mystery that inhabits them and that feeds on them, too, at times, like a beautiful beast. Good writing books can help shoulder it.

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    David Ackley
    Jan 15, 07:02pm

    Marcus copped at least one of mine, but here are a few others:

    1)Too obvious a choice, but in that somewhere is the point, reminding you always, always of the very basics e.g. "Write with nouns and verbs.," from THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, Strunk & White.

    2) The Paris Review Interview series called
    WRITERS AT WORK. You want to find out how other writers worked? Read these.

    3) LIVING BY FICTION, Annie Dillard.

    4) THE LONELY VOICE, talking about the short story, by one of the greatest practicioners, the Irish writer, Frank O'Connor.

    5)Chekhov's letters.

    6) WRITING DEGREE ZERO, Roland Barthes. I can't even pretend to understand all of Barthes, but what I do I like.

    7) Ditto for the collected prefaces of Henry James in THE ART OF THE NOVEL, but they're probably indispensable.

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    David Ackley
    Jan 15, 07:10pm

    Oh, sorry:

    "What makes a good book on writing?"

    Some to keep in the foreground the things that are constants( e.g. Strunk and White). Others, like any information worth seeking, to tell you important things you didn't know, or to cast new light on old assumptions.

    To the list above, in the first category, I'd add two essays by Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," and (not to sound redundant) "The English Language."

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    RW Spryszak
    Jan 15, 08:41pm

    Ernest Hemingway on Writing is an assembled thing and I'm not even sure if Hemingway himself did the compiling, but it's the thoughts of a particular favorite of mine on the subject.

    Boils down to keep it concise, don't fly off in useless directions, be a storyteller, simplicity is elegance.

    Elmore Leonard once advised that writers avoid "the parts people skim over," and what he called the "hoopdeedoodle." That's still pretty good advice.

    But in the final analysis, in my O, if it reads like writing - change it.

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    Gloria Garfunkel
    Jan 15, 08:57pm

    Well, I'm relieved that all of these made the cut in my purge of my writing books, though I wasn't aware of the Tolstoy or Hemingway books or the Orwell essays. So many new books come out on writing each year, but these really are the classics that can't be beat. I also enjoy for it's down to earth humor and practicality Shelly Lowenkopf's The Fiction Lover's Companion. Thanks for the suggestions.

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    Letitia Coyne
    Jan 16, 03:42am

    Books about the process and the interpretation of language are good.

    Books and lists of absolute rules for writing anything are bad. There is no exception to this rule.

    Books are enjoyable that say: I did things this way.

    Books are thrown at the wall which say: You do things my way or it just isn't cricket! I'll tell you what art is, boyo. There are rules. RULES!

    Lxx

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    Marcus Speh
    Jan 18, 02:02pm

    You should all check out Letitia's links and thoughts over at the group: http://bit.ly/WMq4d1 — also, I forgot to mention my FAVORITE book which given that it is for novelists, may not be of interest to the flash crowd: JOHN GARDNER; ON BECOMING A NOVELIST (preface Raymond Carver) — http://bit.ly/WMqobB

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    Gloria Garfunkel
    Jan 19, 04:39pm

    Sam posted an amazingly beautiful poem about reading the Wen Fu which I intend to read, too.

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