8. The Writer’s Notebook

The Writer’s Notebook is a collection of craft essays from well-known writers and writing teachers associated with the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop or with Tin House Books. While the topics of the essays may differ greatly, ranging from historical fiction to fairy tales, from sex scenes to Shakespeare, the essays themselves share a uniform level of authority, polish, wit, and humor that makes them at once entertaining and enlightening. Each essayist speaks to an audience of aspiring writers with all the best empathy and goodwill of one who also has begun the great undertaking of practicing an art but who has gained a little knowledge on some effective practices and techniques.

This collection, then, is for the serious student of the language of fiction who relishes the challenge of viewing her work in different ways. Any writer may find her perspective growing and changing as she considers, for instance, what positive effects the wrong word may have on her work (“Le Mot Incorrect” by Jim Krusoe and “(Mis)Adventures in Poetry” by D. A. Powell) or what she may learn from Shakespeare or F. Scott Fitzgerald (“Shakespeare for Writers: Sixteen Lessons” by Margot Livesy and “Revisioning The Great Gatsby” by Susan Bell). The bottom line is that a writer of any genre, attitude, or experience will find in these varied yet beautifully written essays something familiar, something interesting, something new.

This discovery is exactly what happened to me as I read The Writer’s Notebook—first an essay at a time, and then two, and then five. Reading “Performing Surgery Without Anesthesia” by Chris Offutt about the revision process was like hearing my own thoughts recited, but better expressed; whereas “The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind” by Matthea Harvey was an interesting reflection on some unusual invented worlds but, despite referencing some of my favorite authors, failed, this time, to resonate with me; and yet “There Will Be No Stories in Heaven” by Tom Grimes challenged me to insert a ticking clock, a finite end date, into my work-in-progress in order to raise the level of tension for my characters and readers. What makes me so confident that I can learn from these essays and from the authors’ other works is that each author practices what he or she teaches: the best essays are in fact embodiments of the concepts they propose. “When to Keep It Simple” by Rick Bass is an example of the power and eloquence of simplicity, and “The Telling that Shows” by Peter Rock blends the elements of telling and showing, narration and scene, in a way that demonstrates his own point. I hope to be mulling all that I learned in the back of my mind for a long time.

An aspect of craft that has always appealed to me is form, an under-appreciated topic compared, perhaps, to character or description, so I was particularly delighted to discover so many essays devoted in one guise or another to organization, structure, arrangement, and appearance. My favorite of these form essays was “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale” by Kate Bernheimer, whose award-winning retold fairy tale collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me is sitting on my desk earmarked for consumption. Bernheimer tries to reconcile literary fiction with fairy tale by enumerating traits of tales that inform and enrich other types of fiction; these traits include flatness, a minimalist style of description associated with symbol, and intuitive logic, in which a cumbersome explanation of why things have happened is entirely excised.

The most unique among the form essays, “Material” by Lucy Corin, contained hand-drawn illustrations of the appearance of famous authors’ text on the page. For instance, by comparing the arrangement of text in one of Hemingway’s dialogue-heavy stories to the appearance of the scene breaks in a McCarthy novel, a reader can extrapolate the writer’s philosophies and the fiction’s rhetorical effects. Further, Corin analyzes Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by examining the placement of the word “ACCIDENT!” in the middle of the story as a turning-point signal, as well as the gradually accumulating metaphorical transformation of the character of Bailey into The Misfit. This type of analysis, when applied to an author’s own work, can help them “do something with those patterns to make them rise or fall into the foreground or the internal workings of a story. … Thinking materially about a text, and about the elements that make up a text, is a way of abstracting it so that you can get a sense of a whole that, as a whole, is inconceivable.” To me, as a writer who enjoys working with form and who is currently undertaking a large revision project, this advice is well-phrased and perfectly timed.

The best result of reading The Writer’s Notebook is that I have met many new authors, not in person but in perhaps an even more intimate way. Antonya Nelson’s “Lost in the Woods” reflects on the need for companionship as a basic desire of characters and, of course, humans. This essay ultimately magnifies the driving reason for authors to attend writing conferences or workshops or to read collections of craft essays: we are afraid to be alone. But, Nelson says, just as the fearful, suspenseful search for companionship can sustain hundreds of thousands of stories and novels, the joy and contentment upon the discovery of friendship can strike a chord in a reader. “Fortunately,” she writes, “since the reader has been through the woods with [the character], he isn’t, finally, alone.” At last, this collection reminds writers that lonely is impossible in such renowned and kindly company as the authors in The Writer’s Notebook.

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