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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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