A generous, empathetic writer’s companion.
Encouragement to imagine, write, and revise.
Drawing on decades of teaching, as well as her own writing experiences, Mattison (Bennington Writing Seminars; When We Argued All Night, 2012, etc.) offers a warmhearted guide addressed to those who “not only have the impulse to write stories, but have acted on it repeatedly.” Instead of rules and techniques, she offers personal anecdotes, examples of problems her students have faced, and close readings of a wide range of fiction, all meant to inspire her readers’ imaginations and bolster their efforts. Mattison cautions against self-censorship, often caused by fear of failure, fear of imagining new realities, or assorted other inhibitions: “Writing well involves surprising ourselves, giving what we don’t yet know we care about a chance to emerge.” The central task in writing fiction is “inventing people and actions from nothing, or inventing slight deviations from factual truth.” These inventions come from “what’s most intense in us,” and Mattison counsels writers to fully inhabit their characters to discover their unique personalities. “To whom should this have happened?” she writes, “is a promising question for turning life into fiction.” Writers need also to attend to events, drama, and strong feelings to enliven their plots. Although finished stories have an inevitability that undermines their usefulness as guides, Mattison offers myriad examples from writers including William Maxwell, Doris Lessing, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Rebecca West, Alice Munro, and many others. Tillie Olsen appears not only as an accomplished writer, but as a woman who put aside her fiction to attend to other tasks in her life; George Eliot serves both for her achievements in Middlemarch and as a keeper of a writing journal; and Mark Twain demonstrates the process of revision, as Mattison analyzes three versions of his last book. Rewriting, the author insists, is a crucial task.
A generous, empathetic writer’s companion.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42854-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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