How to Write: Advice and Reflections
Richard Rhodes
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0688149480
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Uniquely fusing practical advice on writing with his own insights into the craft, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes constructs beautiful prose about the issues would-be writers are most afraid to articulate: How do I dare write? Where do I begin? What do I do with this story I have to tell that fills and breaks my heart? Rich with personal vignettes about Rhode's sources of inspiration, How to Write is also a memoir of one of the most original and celebrated writers of our day.
formulate them; they define only one among many possible voices and styles. The Strunk and White voice—good standard English—is the voice of academic discourse, the voice in which most college papers are expected to be written (reason enough to learn it if you’re attending college or college-bound), the voice of scholarly articles and books, those at least not strangled with jargon. It’s actually an English voice more than an American, descended from the prose style favored by Victorian and
retired schoolteacher and administrator in his seventies, went off to the local historical society, exhumed the story of Andrew Drumm, wrote a definitive biography, published it himself, and sold and gave away several hundred copies. I’m on the board of trustees of the Drumm Institute now; we’re arranging to reprint George’s book to use for fund-raising. We’ll probably keep it in print for years to come. My friend Bonnie Ruehter, partner with her husband, Jim, on a big cattle, hog, and grain
R. Bowker, lists literary agents, but a bare list won’t do you much good. You’ll have to network to track down the agent who’s right for you. I strongly recommend you interview agents in person; the agent-author relationship is a marriage of sorts. A brief Book Note reported by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times demonstrates how valuable, not to say saintly, an agent can be: If you’re an author, it helps to have a high tolerance for rejection. Consider Daniel Evan Weiss. His first novel, The
myself by certain self-imposed laws. When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labor, so that the deficiency might be
between the bedstands. I don’t mean to be constructing a hierarchy here. Poets, with the defensiveness typical of embattled minorities, like to think prose is failed poetry written by people who can’t come up to the mark; writers of literary prose look down on genre writers; genre writers think literary writers and poets are quixotic or self-indulgent. The truth is, each is writing in a different form, which has different requirements and meets different needs. James Joyce once claimed he could