Publisher: HarperPerennial (2007)

Pages: Paperback, 272 pages

Price: £8.99

Buy on Amazon UK

Reviewer rating: 

3

Pros: 

Examples of how to write from some of the all-time greatest authors.

Cons: 

Perhaps not the most convincing book ever on improving writing technique.

Prose’s proposition is that writers can learn by studying wonderful examples of writing, and this at the micro level of the text – from picking the right word, to constructing the perfect sentence and choosing the exact moment to mark a new paragraph.

To illustrate her points, she picks some glorious examples from great writers like Alice Munroe, Raymond Carver, Rebecca West and Tim O’Brien. I have to confess that I am a bit of a quote-skipper at times. I fear that they are only going to repeat the point someone is making rather than develop it, and so my eyes tend to stray ahead. But in this book the quotes are really the best bits. In many ways this is Prose’s intention – she wants us to linger over the delicious rightness of these author’s creative choices, to celebrate and admire the writerly genius at work. Her reading of these texts is a slow and generous process of accompaniment as she details the writer’s cleverness in provoking responses in their readers. Look how the author makes us jump here, or leads us into a different idea, or changes perspective! Lovely stuff - and who wouldn't want to be an author celebrated in this way?

But how helpful is this?  

Francine Prose believes (evangelically) that studying these examples will prove instructive, but I’m not so sure about that. I do think that writers learn by reading great authors but the process is a peculiar one of osmosis, by means of which the rhythm and tempo of elegant prose, the organization of plot and character, and the structural shapeliness of fiction are transmitted unwittingly into the bloodstream. As Prose rightly points out, it’s not possible to create rules that can be unwaveringly held in creative writing, as most of the greats break every rule you’re ever likely to tentatively construct. But the alternative, and the outcome of a show-and-admire method, is the simple injunction to be brilliant. To just come up with the stellar descriptive phrase, the stunningly apt word, the machiavellian plot twist. I wonder how many would-be writers might come away from this book feeling an odd mixture of inspired and depressed.

As a reading process, it's also a little reductive. We read first to have a reaction to a book, to be moved, to be impassioned in a straightforward way. But good readers of books are not the ideal readers that authors might choose to have, and that Prose is suggesting we might be. Good readers are often subversive and challenging readers, who refuse to take the meaning of a narrative at face value, who remain awkward and uncompromising, who insist on digging below the shiny surface of the text to unearth its less palatable, less saccharine undercurrents. That’s what makes a reading interesting, and it is in no way incompatible with a respectful and celebratory approach to a novel. We don’t have to be complicit with a novel to admire it, we don’t have to believe everything it says. Undoubtedly the technical prowess of a novel adds to its strengths, but tracing the steps of its construction is not always the most revealing or rewarding way of detailing its brilliance.

But still, whether this is an inspiring extended writing class, or just an anthology of good bits from literature, it DOES collect together and celebrate the work of some fantastic writers, and it is a very dangerous book for making the reader rush to the nearest bookstore and part with a great deal of cash on seductive novels. You have been warned.