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
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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