In writing classes at NYU and elsewhere, we read books by writers on writing. However, I had not heard about this book by Stegner on teaching and writing fiction. It would be a welcome addition to any fiction writing class. Stegner's experience founding and teaching in Stanford University's writing program for 44 years caused him to think deeply about writing, writers and teaching fiction writing. That depth comes out in this 120+ page volume. It is a collection of eight essays including some previously uncollected writings by Stegner on all aspects of fiction writing. As a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and historian, Stegner practiced the writing craft. He not only taught but could also do successfully.
Stegner views fiction as primarily a lens on life. That is the title of the first chapter of this book. Why do we read fiction? Stegner asks. That's a question to spur lively discussion among avid readers/aspiring writers. Stegner posits we read to understand another's (the author's) "refined and distilled spirit, the totality of his understanding....We can make closer contact in fiction than in reality; more surely than we know the secrets of our friends, we how how this writer who is something like ourselves looks upon himself, how he fronts his life, how he, another waif in a bewildering world, has made out to survive and perhaps be at peace. Ultimately, I am convinced, he what we read for. The work of art is not a gem, as some schools of criticism would insist, but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist....And the reward of a lifetime of reading is a rich acquaintanceship with those gentle or powerful or rebellious or acceptant, those greatly mixed and humanly various but always great human ghosts."
How does a writer learn his style? Stegner suggests the best practice for finding the style which suits you is to do what Hemingway did and "simply try to state purely whatever is before his eyes". In a question and answer chapter on writing, Stegner confesses that not everyone can be a fiction writer for a career. Talent is more common that we think, Stegner says, and everyone has some degree of it worth developing.
Other gleanings on teaching and writing fiction to stimulate thought:
* "Creative writing...is sure to involve some search for meaning, some element of wonder and discovery, a degree of personal involvement in the result...delight and revelation."
* "For man and style are inseparable....If he isn't a little dangerous, both to himself and others, he is not living up to his calling..."
* "The fiction writer is an incorrigible lover of concrete things. He has to build fiction out of such materials as the hard knotting of anger in the solar plexus, the hollowness of a night street, the sound of poplar leaves."
* " Literature speaks to temperament, Conrad says. Your books will find the temperaments they can speak to."
* "How can anyone "teach" writing, when he himself, as a writer, is never sure what he is doing? Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can is is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging."
* " And a writer must knock readers down."
* "...ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic....One Macbeth on stage is worth a thousand essays on ambition."
* " To make a novel, Dumas said, you need a passion and four walls. He might have added that to make a passion you need people in a bind, a situation full of love, hate, ambition, longing, some tension that cries to be resolved."
If you like these, you should enjoy this book. I loved it.
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