- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: William Morrow (Aug 12 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0062736396
- ISBN-13: 978-0062736390
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,204,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
For The Eleventh Draft, Frank Conroy solicited essays about writing from 23 fiction writers--all of them one-time Iowa Writers' Workshop students or faculty members. "My instructions to them," says Conroy, "were deliberately vague.... Leaving it open seemed to me to heighten the chances of getting the strongest and least predictable work." Conroy guessed right. Beyond the shared sentiment that writing is hard work, there is, blessedly, no common thread here. For T. Coraghessan Boyle, writing is an addiction as powerful as "putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm." James Hynes claims that writing takes such a toll that "just writing this essay is probably as bad for me as a pack of cigarettes." And Barry Hannah describes writers as "not always the most vital people in the room, but often nearer ghouls sniffing at the trough of other living blood." In the book's most pessimistic piece, Doris Grumbach maligns word processors for destroying the richness of the English language, megabestsellers for the decimation of forests, and the notion of writer-as-celebrity (lionization, she says, does not advance one's writing).
Most of this book's contributors aim, often by way of story, to get at the mysterious heart of the fiction writer's experience. Fred G. Leebron recalls the moment he realized that the characters take the author by the hand, and not vice versa. Elizabeth McCracken confesses to having no inner or outer life, but to stealing all her material from her family. And Scott Spencer underscores the courage needed to create fiction. "A writer who will not risk hurting someone's feelings," he says, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." --Jane Steinberg
From Publishers Weekly
Pity the poor writer anthologized alongside Barry Hannah. There is much to commend in the 22 other contributions to this collection by writers who've taught at Iowa, including Margot Livesey, Francine Prose, James McPherson and Deborah Eisenberg. But few write such startling sentences as this whiplash-inducing hairpin turn from "Mr. Brain, He Want a Song," a meditation on the writing process: "Mr. Brain, he sick of sickness. He want a song, Jack. May I suggest that writing itself is freedom from consciousness as much as stimulant to it." Other highlights include Doris Grumbach's charming, if curmudgeonly, essays on her own beginnings as a writer and as a teacher, and grumblings about the publishing industry and celebrity authors: "It might help the level of prose if they would stop 'appearing' and performing and become the private persons their craft requires them to be." Scott Spencer expresses disappointment with his students' carefulness, their fear of embarrassing themselves. A writer unwilling to express potentially risky and humiliating and hurtful truths, he warns, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." A few of these essays stray into dry, vague disquisitions on the act of writing, highlighting the shortcomings of any such book: the process of writing is nearly always less interesting than what the process produces. Still, a compelling account of a writer's thinking, such as Abraham Verghese's eloquent and heartfelt "Cowpaths," drawing elegant connections between his work as a physician and his work as a writer, is a fine addition to any canon of literature. Never pompous, never dull, he closes his essay with the plainest, most inarguable truth: "That is why I write: because I still find comfort in words, because I find safety in the structures one can build from words, and because it is only by writing that I discover exactly what it is I am thinking." (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some home runs, some foul balls,
By Reader and Writer "Chris" (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Eleventh Draft, The (Hardcover)
When you have a book that is a collection of essays on a subject then it's never quite as good as the best essay, nor is it ever as bad as the worst essay. As far as books like this on writing go, it's a good one.
Essays span everything from craft to life, from the specific to the general. The one's I enjoyed the most were by the editor Frank Conroy who in the introduction provides a quote that should be given to all beginning writers. Ethan Canin makes a great case for detail and sustaining the imagination. Fred Leebron speaks on letting characters become characters, speaking as they are wont to speak. Tom Grimes talks about finishing books and about revising saying that when a book is finally done he can '...as the saying goes, get professional help.' And there is an essay by Francine Prose on details, and she is always clear and wonderful to read. Other invitees seem way off base, talking about their own lives or histories. Elizabeth McCracken for example seems to have utterly missed the purpose of the piece. The book hits about a 80% mark on good essays, a high mark for books like this and more than enough for me to recommend it. And as with such books, you will often go back to the better essays for that rejuvenating elixir.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Congratulations, all of you, on your fine, fine...,
By knucklehead (Beloit, WI) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Eleventh Draft, The (Hardcover)
A toast! Tenure all around. Bravo, marvellous. All of you--really. Really, truly marvelous. So many insights. You've got Paris on the Iowa River out there, you really do. A round table to make King Arthur proud. A real Salon--Kantian style. Brilliant, on every possible level. So true, everything was so true; and so well-said, from start to finish. Not a word out of place. Ideal. Perfection! Stupendous! I can't rave enough. Tenure for everyone! On me!
4.0 out of 5 stars
Charming,
This review is from: Eleventh Draft, The (Hardcover)
Elizabeth McCracken, Stuart Dybek, and Tom Grimes deliver the best here (in my opinion), but the other essays are worth reading. There is throughout the book a shared love of writing--even at its most frustrating and formdible. The title, The Eleventh Draft, is a gentle nudge to the rest of us that God is in the revisions; that no one--not even the best (and these writers are good)--writes easily or quickly, and that the process of writing is just as meaningful as the result (even if nobody ever sees your 11th draft but you). :-)
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