What Is a Literary Craft Book For?
The many-ness of craft (and craft-adjacent) books; the singularity of Eudora Welty
My copy of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings was not to be found. It wasn’t on my shelf of biographies, not on my shelf of Welty novels, not beside the Norton anthology on friendship that Welty co-edited, and not, or so it seemed to me, among my books of literary craft.
Three times in an increasingly frustrating afternoon, I took all those books about craft and the literary life down and piled them into small, stepped hills. No Welty. “Bill,” I called out to my husband, “I’ve lost her.” Because what else to do with my own panic but to share it with the artist trying to think his own thoughts in another room?
I found John Gardner (On Becoming a Novelist): “… one sign of the born writer is his gift for finding or (sometimes) inventing authentically interesting language.”
Found E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel): “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling in causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.”
Found Annie Dillard (Living by Fiction): “At its best, integrity and intelligence go hand in hand to ensure against laziness, false analogies, pleaded connections, and sleight of word. Integrity demands of intelligence that it forge true connections on the page. Intelligence calls for integrity for the challenge of it, and from intelligent respect for the audience of literature, and respect for the art of literature itself, and for its capacity to mean.”
Found Robert Adams (Art Can Help): “It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.”
Found Richard Hugo (The Triggering Town): “So you are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obsessive musical deed.”
Found Amina Cain (The Horse at Night): “For me, authenticity means that how I act and what I say and how I actually feel around others is aligned, that I am connected to myself and to another person at the same time. I want my writing to be authentic too, for every sentence to reach toward honesty and meaning.”
Found Edith Wharton (The Writing of Fiction): “The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.”
Found Nicole Walker (Bending Genres: Essays on Nonfiction): “One imagines that metaphors might be the provenance of fiction and poetry and just an occasional flourish in nonfiction, but really, nonfiction traffics mainly in metaphor. It is only in the suggestion that my life, in memoir, is relevant to yours in the most parallel and associative ways.”
Dozens of literary craft books (or craft-adjacent books, which is to say books about the reading or writing life), an office floor that now required hiking boots, but not Eudora Welty. Surveying the landscape, leaning down, leafing through pages, surveying once again, I began to wonder why I, in all my own writing of literary craft books, ever thought I had anything to add regarding the art of living or making stories.
Earlier today I began my search for Eudora Welty’s classic once again. Swept all those books back down to the floor, stood among the piles, surveyed. There, at last, she was. Small gasp. One Writer’s Beginnings, a paperback dressed in pale pink and gray and adorned with the words: 46 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.
I sat. I turned those treasured, stiffened pages. I wondered what was it that had made this slender book written toward the end of a great writer’s life so very important to me.
A few hours later, I conclude that it is the companionable calm of Welty that I’d been seeking, the very quietude of her literary invitations. Here she is, early on in the book I’d almost lost, but didn’t:
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
We turn to books about the making and loving of books with the hope that they will educate or provoke, rhapsodize or philosophize, draw a line, shine a light, deliberately (we hope it’s deliberate) leave us so bewildered that we will be forced to declare and decide for ourselves. We also turn to them—or return to them—to help us remember how to live. How to listen for. How to watch so very closely. How to know, how not to know. For to write, we must first live. To live we must, at least every once in a while, sit upon a hill of books in search of something we once loved.
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I’ll be talking with
of the National Association of Memoir Writers this coming Friday, June 20, about books that traverse genres, like my own Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News. More about that here.Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.
Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.
You've just sent me on a frenzied search for my Welty. She's been with me for years but she might be in a box with Mark Doty and others who tell such wonderful stories and who have in common that sense of calm. I had to make space but tomorrow's first job will be to find them and put them back where they are needed.
These quotes were perfectly chosen and inspiring. Thank you for sharing.