I love to read writers
when they write about writing; I usually feel like a peeping Tom, and sometimes
they are willing abettors in the act, especially Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy,
Stephen King, or Amy Tan (in Opposite of
Fate, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to know what being a
writer really means). They often expose
themselves, even when they take the tack
of writing a textbook, as do Annie
LaMott in Bird by Bird, or John
Ciardi in How Does a Poem Mean--that
I was introduced by my creative writing teacher Evans Harrington.
While I got a little bit
of that sense of peeking through the blinds in reading Julie Smith’s “how to” book on novel writing, in Writing
Your Way: The Great American Novel Track, the author manages to seem
modestly wrapped in a bathrobe. Her choice of a second person voice in the
title throughout most of the book was probably the key. She seemed as it were,
to be looking back out of the slats at the reader. That was part of her technique, to focus on
the prospective writer.
One of the strengths of
the book, was leaning on Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain’s exemplar Huckleberry Finn as a template of what
makes a novel great. Clemens is undeniably among the greatest American writers.
Plus his critique of James Fennimore
Cooper is perhaps one of the finest warnings to writers that the find authenticity
in their fiction. After reading Smith’s
book one of the things I would dearly love to do is visit her in a literary
salon setting where we could discuss the marvels of Mark Twain., and of course
I would like to tell her why she, and Hemingway, are wrong about the close of
Huckleberry Finn, that indeed it was
some of Clemens bitterest writing, and he could be bitter as milk after eating
grapefruit.
The strength of Smith’s
book is that of a good teacher urging students to just do it. Her three rules
of writings: “Start it. Put your heart in it. Part with it.” are worth the whole book. She says that many a writer finds themselves
asking, “What would Shakespeare do?” That brought to my mind that speech by Hamlet
to actors that could just as easily fit Smith’s instructions, “let your own
discretions be your tutor: suit the action to the word and the word to the
action.” While Writing Your Way is very pedagogical, it is also intuitive and
helpful. My main complain is that it is an e-book, which makes all those joys
of making a paper book one’s own with marginalia and underlining are missing.
The most valuable section is on marketing: or in other words, doing what all
writers write for, finding a readership.
