3 Great Pieces on Writing

Here three renowned authors offer personal, often intimate, commentaries on writing and the writing life. Elizabeth Bowen’s essay “Notes on Writing a Novel” takes its place beside Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Welty’s The Eye of the Story and One Writer’s Beginnings as a work that definitively illuminates the aesthetics of fiction. In a dozen brilliant pages, Bowen imparts absolutely everything you need to know about how to write a novel. Her essay is the most compact, cogent, thorough, and useful statement written on a subject that is ordinarily impossible to crystallize and encapsulate. Read her essay for its beneficial potency.

Long before Rick Bass became the dedicated environmental activist and beloved writer he is today, he was a young man starting out with an intense admiration for the writers whose works he loved and with a bashful desire to know them. In his unabashedly self-revealing essay, “Shy,” Rick describes the antics and hopes that were part of his early ambition to meet the writers and to make works that would be good and lasting.

Likewise, Bill Barich, whose Laughing in the Hills is perhaps the best book ever written about horse racing as well as an enduring meditation on the nature of mortality and the continual desire for renewal, started out years ago in San Francisco trying to find his way into a writing life. In his essay “A Real Writer,” he relates how he fell into being a purveyor of cult West Coast literary works to New York publishing houses in the days when everything California–from macramé to EST–was new, and would-be writers and clients applied to his fledging agency for help. For his efforts, Bill learned a lot about the difference between dedication and accomplishment and about what it takes to succeed.