| Reading another book on writing |
[Jan. 13th, 2008|04:58 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "John Henry" --Kristina Olsen | ] |
I've read a lot of books on writing over the years. I sometimes wonder why I feel like reading yet another, as they all say much the same thing. They all exhort you to write every day. They all tell you to write in your own unique voice. They all have descriptions of first-person and third-person. Basically, they all have stuff I know.
Even so, I like reading books on writing. I hardly ever read one without learning something.
See, the thing is, there are at least three ways to learn something from a book on a topic that you already know thoroughly:
- It contains some new information--something none of the other books thought to mention, and that you hadn't discovered on your own. (You go, "Wow! Who knew?")
- It contains something that other books said, but that this book states particularly well. (You go, "Is that what all those other books were trying to say! I get it now!")
- It contains something that the other books said perfectly well, but that you weren't ready to learn the last twelve times you read it. (You go, "Why didn't someone tell me that before? Wait, I guess they did....")
It's that #3 that keeps me coming back to books on writing. It happens every time I read a book on writing. I'm sure I could go back to any of the old books on writing that I read and find the exact same information, but each new book still manages to teach me something new. The first few had new information (#1), and the best few had information stated especially well (#2), but every one has stuff that I'm only now ready to learn.
This latest time, I read Walter Mosely's This Year You Write Your Novel. It's a fine, fine book for someone who is, as I am, working on a first novel. It doesn't have much in it that's new. Not much that's not in Crawford Killian's advice on novel writing that's free on the web. Not much that's not in Anne Lamott's awesome Bird by Bird. In fact, the overlap with Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction is considerable, even though it's on short stories and Mosley's book is specifically on writing a novel. And yet, like always, there are bits that speak to me.
Mosely vividly describes the sensation (familiar, I'm sure, to any writer) of reading something that you wrote a while ago, and finding good stuff that you didn't remember putting there: the exciting bits, the perceptive bits, the funny bits, the clever bits. Reading about it reminded me how much fun that step is--how satisfying it is to read a draft and find treasures there. It was a reminder I needed, if I was going to get over the hump of actually getting a first draft written.
If you like to read such books, Mosely's is a good choice. Among its other virtues, it's short. Rather than being comprehensive, it focuses in on the things a first novelist needs to be focusing on. (There's only half a paragraph, for example, on writing in second person. Only two pages on getting published.)
I liked it. |
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