Writers Writing on Writing
“When you write, you lay out a line of words,” begins Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe.”
What is writing if not a movement of thought, an investigation of negative space, a line of words on the page? Is it that simple? How does one sit down and do it?
The following list details six books on writing. Each is written by a writer known primarily for either their poetry or fiction, which bleeds into the essay form in all sorts of interesting ways. These books not only investigate writing, they are writing.
Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For the Next Millennium
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Based on a series of lectures Calvino was set to deliver at Harvard University before his death in 1985, this posthumously-published collection of essays details six of Italo Calvino’s greatest aesthetic virtues, or “memos,” which include “Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” “Multiplicity,” and finally, unfinished before his death, “Consistency.”
“Lightness” begins the book extolling the virtues of indirect inquiry, not facing a subject head-on. For Calvino, the ability to grapple with terror, horror, the heaviest of human afflictions, required a soft touch. To move beside it, above it, around it, “to cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone,” to fix one’s “gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.”
In a sense, Calvino’s discourse finds its way into each of the books on this list. Each attempts to talk about writing without talking about writing. Or more so, they hope to edify the reader without providing a how-to.
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life
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Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is a book on writing beloved by writers. In this treatise on the craft, Dillard walks it as she talks it. The movement of her sentences, both in content and composition, reveal the movement of her mind in creation, walking us through her impulses as they happen in real-time. It is a tremendously generous book, as Dillard attempts to hold nothing back, not to obfuscate or dramatize the creative process, but instead to lay it out as simply and plainly as she can, while digressing through humorous and amusing riffs. “Process is nothing,” she writes. “Erase your tracks.”
Fanny Howe’s The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation
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Part memoir, part metatext, Howe’s The Winter Sun explores the author’s relationship to the vocation of writing. Weaving reflections on her childhood in post-war Boston alongside literary and philosophical influences—including the writer Jacques Lusseryan—Howe considers the way in which deep interiority, and the writer’s ability to access it, provides a fount of ____ creativity. As much as this is a book about writing, it is also a book about history, activism, devotion to one’s craft and spiritual pursuits. Fragmentary, hybrid, this collection of notes—they are notes ultimately—traces the life of a writer in pursuit of a vocation which, for her, “has no name.”
Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead
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Canadian poet and novelist, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood dips into the metatextual form with Negotiating with the Dead. In it, she considers the role that death and mystery play in her creative process—as that force which compels her to write, and leads a reader along. She draws upon her experience as a writer to explore the role of writer in society, the origins of storytelling, and the significance of myth and archetype on the personal level. She posits that “not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”
Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir by Haruki Murakami, the renowned Japanese novelist famous dozens of novels including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and 19Q4.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a rare glimpse into Haruki Murakami’s nonfiction. Reading very much like a personal journal or running log, the book is a companion of sorts as we follow Haruki in his preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Through its mundane and repetitive structure, one is lulled into a somewhat meditative state alongside Murakami, as he details his process in specific and unadorned language.
The effect is a way into understanding his mind, his process, what allows him to run a marathon, write a novel, string one sentence after the next. Like Calvino and like Dillard, he does it at indirect angles. Though the entire book can be read as one long metaphor for living, for writing, nothing about it reads as anything other than literal, simple, one foot in front of the other, day in and day out, in the lead-up to a race. In a way, the book’s genius is in its simplicity, its ability to expose writing as nothing more than a line of words on a page, one after the other.
Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction
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Dillard’s lesser-known book on writing, Living by Fiction, attempts to think through storytelling by constantly eluding its subject. Dillard reflects not just on the craft of fiction, but on its role in society and on the reader.
As a writer’s writer, Dillard considers fiction less in terms of conventional structures and plots, and more in terms of style and sentence-to-sentence execution. This is no surprise, as Living By Fiction often feels like a sentence-to-sentence experiment, a how-to that runs off the tracks it builds, in the most delightful and edifying way. In a sense, this is part of its meaning, to make rules, then break them.
She considers the works of Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Cortazar, Nabokov, and other masters of the craft. She uses their texts to consider fiction’s aesthetic virtues, and to explore her own tastes and theories about writing. As always, her sentences are crystal clear, simple yet ringing with the truth.
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This course will demonstrate that the best way to become a good writer is to study the writing of others, especially the work of the masters. Because there are no hard-and-fast rules to writing, it’s important to study what other writers have done and how they consciously make narrative decisions and meticulously select details based on audience and purpose. Clearly, before you can become a good writer, you must read like a writer. In other words, you must become a superb reader who discerns the nuances of narrative techniques and language. Regardless of your genre (mystery, romance, horror, science fiction, fantasy, mainstream, or literary), you will hone your writing skills as a result of this class’ examination of the ways masters of the art and craft created intellectually and emotionally rich and compelling stories that became classics.