Writers [on Writing]

My second book is actually called “Writers [on Writing]” and it’s the first of three volumes of collected essays from The New York Times. This volume has essays by no less than forty-six writers, including personal favourites such as E. L. Doctorow, Ward Just, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, Scott Turow and Kurt Vonnegut Jr: other esteemed contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Saul Bellow.
This book is somewhat different from everyone else’s because each contributor is restricted to one or two thousand words for a newspaper article and therefore cannot begin to tell the story of their lives (which is probably good discipline for me to learn). It also means that I can dive in at random, which, ultimately, I will doubtless regret. For example, though I have a number of ideas in my head for this blog, I now have no idea where in the book I found them!
The first couple of essays I looked at are concerned with the question of whether creative writing can actually be taught at all (and might be of great interest to our instructor), and several have actually taught courses and workshops on the basis that they’ve had their novels published, not because they have any talent for teaching. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who taught creative writing long before his reputation was established, notes that our best teachers are always going to be our editors (and publishers) if your main objective is to be published and read by as many people as possible. Several writers, including Vonnegut and Higgins, have stated the belief that a writer who claims a different objective is lying.
I’ve discovered some interesting ‘exercises’ which I’m actually glad we weren’t put through, such as writing short stories with absolutely no adjectives, or no adverbs, as ways to appreciate the power of unqualified verbs and nouns. Or of writing of a childhood experience through the eyes of the child you were, and then repeating the piece through the eyes of the adult you’ve now become. Vonnegut also points out that the best teachers (and editors) may not be able to write well themselves, but we should value them highly nonetheless.
The originator of the series, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist and editor, John Darnton, tells a little of his early life as a writer and his idea for the series (in one thousand words) and relates this encouraging advice he personally benefitted from: one thousand words a day, every day, means you have a completed novel in three to four months.
Finally (for now) a piece by Anne Bernays, born in 1930, a well respected writer, editor and publicist whom I’d never heard of, who spent a large part of her career teaching others: “There’s a sureness to good writing even when what’s being written about doesn’t make all that much sense. It’s the sureness of the so-called seat of an accomplished horse-back rider or a sailor coming about in a strong wind. The words have both muscle and grace, familiarity and surprise.” I take encouragement from that. The trick, it seems to me (and probably applies to most of us) is to maintain self confidence while still be willing to take criticism and advice.
I guess that’s true about everything, not just writing.