The Weekend Writer: Reading About Writing

I am picky about what I read on the subject of writing, because back in the day when I did read more of them, I found that books about writing tended to be the same thing over and over and were often very boring.

However, 18 of Our Favorite Books About the Craft of Writing by Leah Schnelbach  from Tor.com sounds interesting. It includes well-known books like On Writing and Zen in the Art of Writing but a lot of things I haven't heard of, even when I've heard of their authors. While I'm a lot more interested in generative workshops than craft workshops, I might give one of these craft books a try.

Hmm. Reading and blogging about one of these could be an arc for The Weekend Writer feature here at OC.

A Zenny Book For Writers

My big Retreat Week professional read this year was One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers by Gail Sher. I've got to tell you, I just do not know what to make of this book. I can imagine myself quoting from it. I can imagine myself referring to it for bits I recall and want to check out again. But I can't say that I got tremendous amounts from it and don't know who I would necessarily recommend it to.

For one thing, I think you have to have some knowledge of Zen and writing to make heads or tails of this thing. For instance, it begins with an exercise called "Writing Zazen: Write on the same subject every day for two weeks. Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter places of subtler more "fringe" knowing."

Now, I happen to know that zazen is meditation. I have even thought that freewriting or morning pages might serve as a form of meditation.  But how many people picking up this book know what zazen is? And there wasn't anything in this short exercise description that tells readers that Sher is suggesting meditation. I was so freaked out by that, that I looked up zazen to make sure that I did, indeed, know what it was.

There was another section called "Not Knowing," which seemed similar to what I learned of as beginner's mind. I actually do try to maintain the mind of a beginner. The concept, as I know of it, isn't all that difficult to understand. But Sher's "Not Knowing" is a little different. "For a writer, "not knowing" means giving over the part of you that knows to the writing. The writing tells you what it is." Okay, I had trouble with this section of the book because it did remind me of something I already knew about, and I'm trying to superimpose my knowing onto it. Which would mean that I'm not maintaining the mind of a beginner at all.

Wow. I'm not getting a lot out of that and blowing my mind while doing it.

I wonder if these pieces couldn't be considered meditations or something like dharma talks, except, of course, about writing. They're too mystical for beginning writers and too simple for experienced ones. You'll only like these kinds of things if you like these kinds of things.

The title One Continuous Mistake doesn't refer to the book's whole concept. It's just the title of one of these essays and refers to a Zen teacher's statement that "Zen practice is one continuous mistake." I think I would enjoy reading someone's meditation/writing talk about writing practice being one continuous mistake, but that wasn't what Sher's One Continuous Mistake essaylet was about. At least, I don't think it was.  The book's subtitle Four Noble Truths for Writers, was also the title of an essay. The title refers to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

There was a great deal in this book that attracted me but then didn't go anywhere...for me. What does that mean? It could mean something. While reading One Continuous Mistake, I began to think that I'd like to be part of a writers' book group that read and discussed nothing but books about writing, which is something I'm quite certain I'd never considered before.

I didn't learn much from reading this book. I didn't take a lot from it that I can use in my writing or my life. I merely had an experience while reading it. And I probably shouldn't use the word "merely" when saying that.

 

My Experience With Lucy Calkins

So I finished my skim of Writing Fiction: Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions by Lucy Calkins. It's not what a nonteacher would call riveting reading because it models lesson plans with some coaching on the side by Lucy. Plus, I don't imagine even many teachers would sit down and try to get through one of these books as quickly as possible. They probably do their serious reading on a lesson-by-lesson need.

Calkins covers some very real and even sophisticated writing material here on character development, plotting, planning scenes, and doing drafts. I have no idea how well elementary school children are able to absorb and use this, but it seems as if Calkins could do a general intro to writing book that older writers might find useful.

She quotes many, many writing books in the coaching material. I read this in front of a computer and kept going on-line to find the authors quoted and their books. I wish there'd been a bibliography with Calkins' book. However, the one I read is part of a set on writing lesson plans. Maybe there's a bibliography somewhere for the whole set.

Calkins talks a great deal about the story format of giving a character something to want and then putting up obstructions to them getting it. "The core structure of a short story, in a nutshell, is that a character wants or needs something (or needs to learn something) and then encounters obstacles in reaching this goal." After hearing her talk about this over and over again, I started thinking about  Rust Hill, who said over and over again in Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular that stories are about "something that happened to somebody." When I find my copy of his book, I'm going to reread it, because a story being about "something that happened to somebody" is making a lot more sense to me right now than a story being about  a "character [who] wants or needs something (or needs to learn something) and then encounters obstacles in reaching this goal."

Calkins definitely puts on...pressure...for teachers and students to stick to writing her preferred type of fiction--realistic,  problem-based, social issue types of things. When discussing where writers get ideas, she says, "Teach them, too, that fiction writers read newspapers and watch the news on TV, noticing ways in which the world feels unfair for some people." Many, many writers get ideas from newspapers. I don't think we're looking only for story ideas relating to people being treated unfairly, though. That is a story idea that certainly has some dramatic potential, but it is also just one particular type of story. I think more often we're  looking for ideas that lend themselves to a story format or frame in which, well, something happens to somebody.