A succinct, clear, and encouraging companion for aspiring writers.
Practical writing advice from an acclaimed storyteller.
Prolific writer Le Guin (The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth, 2012, etc.)—author of more than 60 books of fiction, poetry, drama, and translation and winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, among other awards—brings her experience as a writing workshop leader to this revision of her 1998 publication. In 10 chapters, the author considers basic writing topics, such as sound, rhythm, grammar, syntax, parts of speech (especially verbs, adverbs, and adjectives), and point of view. Each chapter contains examples from literature: an excerpt from Austen’s Mansfield Park demonstrates the author’s “vivid and versatile” syntax; a “glaringly bright scene” from Dickens’ Little Dorrit shows the power of a “single word…repeated like a hammer blow.” In addition, Le Guin has created short exercises “to clarify and intensify” awareness and hone technique. One exercise, “Am I Saramago,” (alluding to the Portuguese novelist who uses no punctuation), asks readers to write a 150-350–word narrative with no commas, periods, or paragraph breaks. A four-part exercise on point of view calls for writing a 200-350–word narrative and retelling it from the point of view of participants, a detached narrator, an observer-narrator, and an involved author. Le Guin guides readers in evaluating their work by themselves and in giving and responding to peer critiques. “While being critiqued,” she advises, “make notes of what people say about your story, even if the comments seem stupid. They may make sense later.” The book’s title emphasizes the author’s belief that writing is essentially a craft that can be learned, practiced, and improved through attention and self-discipline. “Forced to weigh your words,” she writes, “you find out which are the Styrofoam and which are the heavy gold.”
A succinct, clear, and encouraging companion for aspiring writers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-61161-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
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
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