“The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House”
The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
I'm not sure if this constitutes a book review -- I'm enjoying the book far too much. The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House isn't a ground-breaking collection. But it's instructive, eloquent, and funny. It's marketed as the home-schooling version of the writer workshops held every summer at Tin House in Portland, Oregon. And to make sure that you, too, can tap into the performative aspect of attending the sessions, the accompanying CD features two panel discussions held at the workshop. Pop it in the computer and listen to Charles D'Ambrosio, Chris Offutt, and Sallie Tisdale (among others) debate the line between fiction and nonfiction.
It's loads of fun.
Respected writers explore discreet elements of writing such as scene (Anna Keesey), character (Aimee Bender), form & fairy tale (Kate Berheimer), word choice (Jim Krusoe), and place (Dorothy Allison). Other writers examine issues like managing time in a narrative (Tom Grimes), drawing from history (Jim Shepard), the process of revision (Chris Offutt),writing sex (Steve Almond), and editing and an artful editor (Susan Bell). All of the essays use the work of well-know authors to elaborate their points. Sometimes an essay's use of these references can be unsatisfying, such as when the examples illustrate the extreme poles of how to approach a craft issue. This happens in Anna Keesey's discussion of Virginia Woolf's (an infolder) and Ernest Hemingway's (an unfolder) approaches to the scene. Most writers, as Keesey acknowledges, work in the murky area between these extremes. Delving into the murky gray, however, is not a strength of this type of books in general, so my disappointment was slight.
Not everyone loves these kinds of books, of course, and The Writer's Notebook has stirred up its share of passionate discussion. Dan Green criticizes it as being overly concerned with established conventions of storytelling. He connects this to the workshop experience in general (where, he says, it's easier to talk about craft than to talk about art and the purpose of art). I bristle at his seeming cattle call for the avant-garde as the standard for "art"--but maybe he's calling out for another return of Dada, which I wouldn't be against since we could then divert the dichotomy he establishes between talking craft and talking art. Still, I'm a bit of a nerd. When I was young, I'd take the bus downtown and hole up in the library to read grammar, stye, and craft books. Reading books like this one makes me feel deliciously young and free and able to do anything. And, lo and behold, in "Generating Fiction From History and/or Fact," Jim Shepard quotes Walter Murch (Hollywood editor responsible for Apocalypse Now and other movies), giving me a glimpse into my own glee:
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Bingo. No wonder I'm so happy in my job. But the craft lesson? Here's Shepard on reaching out to the surprises of the world and allowing them to inform us and our art, much the way kids do with all their questions and journeys:
When the French novelist Émile Zola wanted to understand the lives of coal miners in 1884, he descended into the mines to research what would become his novel Germinal. One hundred and fifty feet below the ground he viewed an enormous workhorse pulling a sled through a tunnel. He asked the miners how they got the animal in and out of the mine each day. At first they thought he was joking. When they realized he wasn't, one of them said, "Mr. Zola, don't you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he's barely more than a foal and can fit in the buckets that bring us down here. He grows up down here. He grows blind down here from lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can't haul anymore. He dies down here and his bones are buried down here."
That's a metaphor for--and an empathetic understanding of--the miner's lives that the world taught Zola and that he had to be receptive to in order to write a book as great as the one he then wrote.
The essays use stories, like this one, to guide us to writing principles. This is not a fussy "rules" book.
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