Most writers lust after the opportunity to attend a workshop and meet our heroes. Here in one book, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, is a taste of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, held in Portland, OR since 2003. This intimate guide includes discussion of writing techniques, and includes a CD with two of the workshop panels, "Using Rel Life in Fiction" and "A Conversation on Crafting Characters." Seventeen authors are represented here, including Dorothy Allison, Kate Bernheimer, Matthea Harvey, Anna Keesey, Margot Livesey, and those mentioned below.With these writers, we explore the love/hate relationship a writer has with the mind, the words, the pen, and the reader.
From Aimee Bender, we learn that she too puzzles over the psychology of characters and what they want. We learn that writing is a process of discovering exactly that.
In "When to Keep It Simple," Rick Bass, author of 24 works of fiction, advises "Ornate sentences and thoughts are harder to sustain and nurture than simple ones. When you get into trouble, prune back, simplify. Hide the complex or ambitious thought, for now, and live to write another day."
Bass urges us, at every stage, to reside at the edge of our comfort zone, and shows how, even after a long literary career, he still struggles with words and sentences. It's both humbling and empowering to realize this is the way it is with words on the page.
Read "There Will Be No Stories in Heaven," by Tom Grimes, where he teaches us that our stories are amorphous until we discover how time controls them. "Every great story contains a 'clock,' an intrinsic timekeeper. Lacking this, a story could go on forever. Yet, no matter how great a story is, we long for it to end. Endings offer us solace, and time, not infinity delivers it. Time organizes, advances, and limits a story, thereby satisfying the reader's craving for narrative coherence and closure." Grimes then does a beautiful job of using The Great Gatsby to illustrate its perfect use of time. This essay is a workshop in itself.
One of the freshest pieces is "material" by Lucy Corin, who helps us understand the physical aspects of our writing. She views the physical layout of the words on the page, and the shapes and forms and patterns of our prose [dialog, narrative] in ways I've never seen. By looking for keys to a story's core message, Corin cleverly finds patterns that rise and fall into the story, things we know but don't really see when we read. To deal with this, you have to read your drafts in a very dynamic and playfully analytic way, just as you would read a great piece of writing you're trying to learn from.
ISBN 978-0-97941-981-2
Reviewed by Helen Gallagher, Computer Clarity
http://www.computerclarity.com/
http://www.releaseyourwriting.com/
A longer version of this review appears on Helen's blog at Salon.com and includes reference to one additional rather vulgar essay.
