On Writing

I suppose we read books on writing for either or both of two principal reasons. We may want to understand a particular author better; and/or we may want to learn to become a better writer ourselves, learning at the knee of these exemplars.

As I pay more attention to my own writing, I find over the years that when I read fiction, I am often reading to see how a particular author does it. Such bifurcated attention to reading inserts itself between my study to improve and my engagement with the sense the story or novel. Either I must focus on one or the other task, possibly reading more than once, or examine and reflect after my more passage when first absorbed.

Outside of public school English classes and general education college classes, I have never gone to authors’ school. I did sign up for old Doc Paulsen’s creative writing class at St. Olaf. But after the first session in which he told us he couldn’t teach us how to write, I believed him and switched to literary criticism with “Rocky;” that is, Dr. Rottsolk. That class and an early reading of Coombes’ Literature and Criticism (1953) and Aristotle’s Poetics presaged my sense of authorial self-examination.

Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto (1969) that recapitulates many of her early essays, read after college, set the standard for me. Subsequently few books on writing that I continued to seek out made as much difference to me as Rand had. Though The Romantic Manifesto is philosophical in approach, other titles on writing were all far more discursive without being helpful in the prescriptive sense. Though various books helped me in differing ways, they proved too Zen for me to grasp and put to use. Nothing until Rand’s The Art of Fiction (Boeckmann, 2000) and The Art of Nonfiction (Mayhew, 2001) were of consistent help.

When learning to write from others, fledglings suffer two threatening perils. Thinking that someone exists whom you can copy is fatuous. To imitate another author is to deny your own unique sensitivity. Authorial advice comes by suggestion and must accordingly be tested and applied where possible by one’s own trial and self-critical judgment of success. However much we may model others and hold ourselves against them, eventually writers must find their own voice.

Here are some helpful guides which have worked for me.

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984).
Three lectures have become one book. Welty in the first two sections dwells on her ancestry or parental influences and her earliest years. Since she lived most of her life in Jackson Mississippi, except for brief interludes away at school and work, those roots run deep.

Eventually she pulls away from all her reflections on those early influences of ancestry and childhood that shaped her writing. The third lecture is more overt and pronounced in its exposition of her writing life and philosophy. She wanted to be a writer; she wanted to see more of the world away from home. After higher education at Mississippi State Women’s College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University business school, she was on her way to writing. She drew on her experiences, probed her interior, connected it with the world, and saw beyond the appearance of everyday things. She ends: “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Upon re-reading One Wriher’s Beginnings and studying Welty for book club discussion, I realized that this book, though veiled and ending at her maturity, is as self-revelatory as she ever became. Otherwise, she wants her writing to stand on its own content and meaning without explication or any relationship to her own or anyone else’s biography.

I, too, have often worried about explicating too by way of accounting for my idea origins, characters and incidents. Those traces may be there, but they are mixed and switched.

David Madden, Revising Fiction (1988).
On cover: 185 practical techniques for improving your story or novel.

Though I had not found much practical or concrete help up to the Rand books on writing, that switched. After them, I found David Madden’s Revising Fiction: a handbook for writers thanks to my continuing bookstore prowls.

What Madden does is analyze and categorize writing problems and diagnoses them with examples of actual revisions. He shows how the likes of Sanuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, William Morris, etcetera – all the bigs of the NOVEL have improved their own writing. This is the best course in writing I can imagine.

I find that Madden helps me contend with my worst weaknesses. The attendant problem is that his coverage is so all-inclusive that it is hard to apply without being just as systematic and assiduous in one’s own industry. Nevertheless, I plan to spend a lot more time with his help, especially in the final revisions.

Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction (2001).
Amazingly, the Rand industry goes on 18 years after her death. As with The Art of Fiction (2000), a series of old, recorded lectures has become an unintended book. Robert Mayhew edits The Art of Nonfiction: a guide for writers and readers. This culling and organization of salient points is a success.

Rand’s voice comes through, and her insights prove practically useful. I overlooked the dated references where her particular bête noirs are on display as with her unrelenting atheism and disaffection from her contemporary culture. She acknowledges few antecedents or analogues to her own writing outside of How to think creatively (1959) by Eliot Hutchinson.

Rand learned on her own, by analyzing other writing, abstracting general principles and applying them to her own endeavors and by practice. Writers write is her theme, and the diligently self-aware who follow this dictum can become more proficient. Writing is a worthy challenge, she asserts, and she is at her best in presenting the psycho-epistemology of the writing process.

As with everything Rand does, she weds her writing to its philosophical underpinning – objectivism. Thanks to her own expression and this editing, her approach to writing comes across as systematic and incisive, however impromptu and transitional these lectures were in their original form. The book diagnosed and laid bare several of my problems – even deep-seated ones especially of doubt and procrastination, and keeping these techniques fresh in mind will set me on new paths.

Later when our son asked for suggestions to improve his writing, I bought him a copy of The Art of Nonfiction, one I found remaindered, of course.

Rand does not fare well among the literati, even when she is most helpful.
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© 2009 by Roger Sween.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.