Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer

 

Just finished - long overdue! - Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. Whenever I read a prescriptive craft book, such as Save the Cat, my first reaction is, "Yes! That's right! This is so helpful!" but then a gloom quickly settles and I feel confined. I want to create Guernica, and I'm handed a paint-by-the-numbers set. Which is why I much prefer books of this sort.

Prose does offer concrete advice, but then immediately searches for authors that successfully violate it. It reminds me a little of Pete Hein's little rhyme, "Take no advice at any price, that's what I call good advice." And yet the book is wonderfully liberating, inspiring, and encouraging.

Perhaps her signature advice is observe. Observe everything - gestures, details, conversations. And not least, be an observer of what you read. Study it, learn from it.

I wish I were as well and broadly read as Prose. She has read so much I haven't, and everything I have read, she's read multiple times.

Highly recommended.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

 

Just finished Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

Highsmith, if you're unfamiliar with her, wrote what are popularly termed "thrillers;" her most famous works are Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Really, though, what she produces are psychological portraits, particularly portraits of profoundly disordered minds, or ordinary minds that become disordered. 

Her novels are free of gore but are profoundly disturbing because they present a dark and amoral world and the capacity for evil in all of us. Her tone is a sense of creeping and well-justified paranoia. Graham Green called her "the poet of apprehension."

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is not a craft book per se, and if you're looking for tips and techniques, you should probably look elsewhere. But Highsmith's candid, matter-of-fact exploration of the writing life is bracing and encouraging. She doesn't put on airs about herself - her most frequent adjective to describe her novels is "amusing" and yet she is clearly dead serious about her commitment to quality writing. The book is a fast read and includes a "case study" of The Glass Cell, a novel I recently reread and particularly recommend.