Win On Teaching And Writing Fiction Edited By Wallace Stegner Digital Copy

book was on a list of books to select as a potential textbook for one of my classes this semester, Rather than picking one at random, I started at the beginning of the list and am working my way down, Overall, considering that I'm not teaching fiction, the last two thirds of the book weren't particularly helpful, though it does highlight things that professors should not do, so I may keep this one tucked away as a source to cite.
That being said, however, the first third of the book was actually about writing fiction and I found Stegner's views on writing both in alignment with my own and full of new insights that I had not yet thought about or of within the context of writing fiction.
It's a very well informed book, This book focuses on the philosophy of teaching fiction, Some interesting nuggets, but I found myself skimming most of it, especially since a lot of his advice/insight about publishing is no longer relevant.
This wasn't a manual for writing, It was a meditation on what it means to write/teach fiction, This book is beautiful and true, It is classic prose, as defined in sitelinkClear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, I learned so much from On Teaching and Writing Fiction, though I do not love the concrete as a fiction writer must, I just wanted to learn about the mind and motivation of telling stories, I will give it to any young person who wants to write fiction, as both guide and warning, Mr. Stegner used his own story, "Goin' to Town" as a profoundly touching and effective example,

I suppose that I must defend to the death the right of any reader to give this book less than four, and it doesn't seem right to condemn such people to hell, but I do hope that wherever they end up the only reading matter is automotive service manuals.
I have on my desk at work, an anthology opened up to Maupassant's "The Necklace," because students often choose this story for their narrative responses it's not difficult to see why: it's a simple plot with complex meaning, and a story immaculately presented.
Imagine my surprise to learn that as a writing exercise, Maupassant, who was Flaubert's student, was usually sent by his teacher to "report in a single phrase or a single word the content of an action.
" You don't get any more concrete than that,

Wallace Stegner, one of the first group of Americans to receive a graduate degree in creative writing from the notable Iowa Writer's Workshop, uses this example to show that creative writing is not based on ideas the creative writer is "compulsively concrete," and,

the moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic.

Wallace Stegner "with less than a handful of others, invented creative writing as a field of study within the Academy, and from thes on, similar, frequently imitative, sprang up all over the country.
Stegner taught first at Utah, then at Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford, where inhe founded and directed the Stanford Writing Program until his early retirement in.
" According to Stegner, writing instruction began with Dean Le Baron Russell Briggs of Harvard, who produced many writers from his classes Robert Beechley being one of them.
Charles Townsend Copeland followed Briggs and there were movements like Bread Loaf, started by Robert Frost and others, There was the Iowa Workshop inwhere Stegner was one of the first graduates founded when Norman Foerster established the "School of Letters, "

I'm trained to teach creative writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, but due to the intricacies of academia, I find myself teaching Freshman Composition, while those with degrees in Rhetoric, teach Creative Writing.
If it sounds confusing, this is because the world of academia sometimes is this way, If you're familiar with the scope of grammatical and textual analysis in composition not to mention the rules of scholastic writing, MLA guidelines, for example as opposed to the delicacy attached to words and form in creative writing, not to mention the special attention paid to style, syntax, content, and voice, you know just how different these subjects are.
"Creative writing begins in the senses, " Composition begins on the paper, or in the conscious mind,

A mannered style is more often than not a sign that a writer hasn't much to say,

And this is not a bad thing, for composition at least, because the writer of composition has books, research, an outlined response, and designed topics from which to choose what she will say.
Creative writers, however, are a different breed and cannot be forced into this "mannered style" of academia, While quietly pondering this for weeks, I came across Steve's excellent review sitelink goodreads. com/review/show on Stegner's sitelinkCrossing to Safety and it reminded me that if I needed to turn to the written word for inspiration, why not turn to the man who helped set a standard for creative writing in America, the same one who said that the "Socratic burden" of teaching writing is "more an attitude than a technique"

Creative writing, whether it takes the form of poem, short story, novel, play, personal essay, or even biography or history, is sure to involve some search for meaning, some element of wonder or discovery, a degree of personal involvement in the result

When Stegner founded the writing program at Stanford, it was because he suddenly found himself with students out of the armed services with "many more things to write, and with a sense of urgency.
" He wanted to do something to encourage those "gifted people, " So he tried to get "fellowship money, to buy some time" for those writers, As a result, the Stegner Fellowship has produced so many authors of some of our favorite books: Ernest Gaines, Edward Abbey, Tillie Olsen, NoViolet Bulawayo, Tracy White, Harriet Doerr, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, Anthony Marra, Jesmyn Ward, Scott Momaday, and more.


This book has an educational, yet conversational tone, akin to a writing workshop, I picked it up and it captured my attention, for obvious reasons, and held it I'll give five to any book that manages to do this.
There is a chapter on an indepth and enthralling interview, and a chapter which includes one of his short stories as it is a transcription of one his readings.
Lovers of fiction will enjoy reading this, as it is directed not only to teachers, but to writers and readers of fiction, The book could possibly "ruffle feathers," as it mentions "serious fiction" and "serious artist" versus the artist who sees artistry as "the hallmark of that peculiarly repulsive sin of arrogance by which some practitioners of the arts retaliate for public neglect or compensate for personal inadequacy.
" Uhhuh, he went there.

Favorite chapters:

"Fiction: A Lens on Life"
"Creative Writing"
"To A Young Writer"
"On the Teaching of Creative Writing"

One looks for evidence that eyes and ears are acute and active, and that there is some capacity to find words for conveying what the senses perceive and what sense perceptions do to the mind that perceives them.

Words of wisdom from a man who devoted his life to perfecting his craft and to teaching it, The clarity of mind that is achieved only after a lifelong journey of carefully and meticulously distilling ideas and thoughts into words is evident in this short yet informative collection of essays.
Having read this collection right after "remembering laughter", Stegner's first novel, I couldn't help but notice how much Stegner's craft had improved, It felt as if he truly took in every advice he was offering in this book to young writers, The short story "Goin' to Town", included as part of an essay late in the book, is emblematic of everything he is advocating: the importance of the lived experience, the playfulness of the language, the deep observation of an otherwise mundane event and the impact of choosing the right point of view.
While the book is ruminations of a great writer on the process of creative writing, which may appear as useful only for aspiring writers, it provides pointers and a mental framework for the generic reader to approach fiction with a new sense of understanding of the creative process behind

it and the decisions a good writer has to make.
The man can do no wrong, Even though Stegner sometimes comes off as pompous, this is a helpful book in some aspects, The best and most helpful part of the book is from an interview that Dartmouth College did with Stegner, In it, he explores if one can teach creative writing and how does one go about doing so, bravely saying or not so bravelyhe is retired here that not everyone is capable of learning how to write.


The other interesting chapter was, “To a Young Writer,” an intimate and honest response to an inquiring writer, asking all the questions many beginning writer asks about agents, on what to publish, etc.
. Stegner gives his inquirer more I can see assigning this brief chapter to a beginning fiction writing class to address assumptions and questions many students have at that level.


My rating is low because a lot of the book is either common sense or for the very beginning writer, So for me, the rating is lower than usual, but the book is not necessarily bad, if that makes sense, Awesome book on craft. One of my goto resources, Stegners prose is some of the best literary fiction in existence, so it stand to reason a book on craft from him would be a standout.
Not only comes down on the "yes" side of "can writing be taught" but explains how and why it matters,

Stegner, Wallace. On the teaching of creative writing: Responses to a series of questions, Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. Hanover, NH: UP New England,, Print.


Quotes:
"Nobody can tech the geography of the undiscovered, All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging", The teacher's "job is to manage the environment",

Students need "to be taken seriously, they need to be assured that their urge to write is legitimate, And, eve when they must be discouraged from wasting their lives in a hopeless effort, they must not be dismissed flippantly"

"It is fatal though by no means unheard of for a teacher to impress his own craft, as well as his own conceptions, upon his students".


"I do subscribe to the notion that in order to write a great poem one should be, in some sense or other, a great poet.
That suggests that any writer had better be concerned with the development of his personality and his character",

"everybody will benefit from a good, deep, wellworn and familiar rut",

Once committed to the parental role a teacher can be swamped, . . students collective need can swallow his whole life",

"English department have, with some grumbling, made room for writers, feeling sometimes with justification that these people can sling words but are lacking in both learning and culture.
The writers, on the other hand, often take the view that English teachers are disappointed writers, that they teach because they can't do , and that envy and jealousy are behind their resistance to the full academic acceptance of writers".


Composition is "absolutely essential, . . and it is never done well enough, It has its basis in grammar andsyntax, which are simply the logic of the language",

Emphasizes the Socratic by name a couple of times and "the end is not the production of clones of any approved style or writer" and "writing is a social act, an act of communication both intellectual and emotional".
" dictated from the cellar of the subconscious where reality waits to be civilized into fiction, "
A collection of essays to inspire and humble, Right off the bat Mr, Stegner makes a distinction between what he calls "serious fiction" vs "escapist fiction, " I'm honestly tired of the constant bickering between the literature professor type readers and writers who have to bring their ego to everything they read.
My opinion is and shall remain that if YOU like the book, then the book is good for YOU, No one else's opinion matters, Possible exceptions to this standard being books that promote morally shady things such as glorifying violence against women or something,

Anyway, I read a collection of Wallace Stegner short stories for my Western American Literature class and I am currently reading Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.
I enjoyed his short stories and I have a particular interest in his works and career because he took a very similar career path to and seems to share many common interests with me.
I decided to read this book because I read a lot of books about people who have things to say about writing, and like Stephen King's On Writing this book got bumped pretty high up the list since his writing actually proves what he knows what he is talking about.
Despite our clearly different definitions of quality in fiction, I did find a few of his insights valuable,

He talks a lot about the distinct boundary between the creator and the audience when writing fiction, I think the onset of social media has weakened that boundary, but the points that Stegner makes about how this can affect our writing were interesting and valuable.


His various opinions on how creative writing can/should be taught made a lot of sense to me, I took a creative writing class a couple semesters ago and the class was run a lot like Mr, Stegner suggests in this book and I found it was a positive environment for me to improve my writing, Some of Mr. Stegner's suggestions could have made it even better,

There were others, but those are the two that stand out the most to me, As much as I respect the craft and quality of Mr, Stegner's fiction, it seems to me that we write for very different reasons, and that that will largely invalidate some of his opinions about the mental/emotional/psychological needs relating to writing etc.


A decent book, gives a number of quality writing tips, especially near the end of the book, Just very little I haven't heard before and it took a lot of words to get to the nuggets I found valuable,

/.