Scratch a Pulitzer Prize winner, find a former Hallmark Card employee with a troubled past and a passion to write. Early on in this spirited handbook for beginners, Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986, etc.) introduces the concept of a palimpsest, a manuscript written on more than once, with the earlier writing perhaps still legible. Such are the rules of the game the author operates under in constructing this multifaceted work. On the surface sits a workmanlike narrative that offers solid advice on the craft of writing and covers all the important bases: motivation, voice, structure, research, and getting published. Rhodes teaches by example and in doing so shows he also knows how to sell: Within the first 100 pages he manages to plug or provide juicy paragraphs from eight of his published books and a work-in- progress. Beneath this discourse shines an anthology of meditations, poems, and anecdotes on writing by a menagerie of the gifted, including Anthony Trollope, Fran Lebowitz, Walt Whitman, and Sherwood Anderson. In the base layer of the book lurk the closet skeletons of Rhodes's psyche, revealed in a small handful of frightening autobiographical asides with which he somehow cannot resist shocking his pupils. When an early novel had trouble getting off the ground, suddenly his ``old flirtation with suicide returned.'' Similarly, comments about a ruined previous marriage and a painful childhood are presented with such matter-of-fact casualness during the course of instruction that one has trouble knowing just where and how to focus one's attention. Rhodes plainly states that anyone can write. But his subconscious seems to be whispering that it helps if you have suffered.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-14095-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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