Books on Writing Part 3

I'm veering slightly off the path of instructional writing books to bring you a slightly different option. I'm very conscious of the fact that not everyone learns the same way. That being said, I'm offering a different style of book on writing this week.

It's called The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction by Ann Charters (I've read both the 7th and 8th editions, but offered the 8th edition's cover for you to view).

The Story and Its Writer differs from the other two writing books I've offered thus far because it does not go step-by-step through the process of writing or publishing. Instead, the book is a collection of fantastic short stories written by the greats (like Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, and John Updike) followed by commentaries written or spoken by the authors themselves on the craft, the story, the industry (basically, all the interesting things you'd need to know going into fiction writing).

Some great quotes from the commentaries section:

"Urgency does not mean frenzy. The story can be a quiet story...but it must be urgently told. It must be told with as much intentness as if the teller's life depended on it. And if you are a writer, so it does, because your life as the writer of each particular story is only as long, and as good, as the story itself. Most of those who hear it or read it will never know you, but they will know the story. Their act of listening is its reincarnation...From listening to the stories of others, we learn to tell out own." (Margaret Atwood "Reading Blind" 1989)

"A story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment." (Flannery O'Connor "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable" 1969)

"My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It's an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent." (Raymond Carver "On Writing" 1981)

You'll enjoy this book if: you particularly like writing short fiction or short nonfiction, you like large books, you like a variety of viewpoints on the same topic, or the lives of past writers intrigue you.

The Story and Its Writer not only features short stories and commentary, but also spouts of graphic novel and photography. What I also found helpful in this book was an appendix that defined common terms like setting, first-person narration, style and theme.