Letters to a Fiction Writer
by By Busch, Frederick (EDT)
Category: Literary Collections , Letters

Brilliant inspiration from some of our most renowned and respected fiction writers on the craft of writing and the writing life. "Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish . . . write just one page for each day. . . . Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down," instructs John Steinbeck. "When your interest is engaged, i.e., in the sounds and smells of your city, you write admirably. But until these details become the envelope of a clear and legible emotion, ambition, or dilemma, the reader's interest, while respectful, will be to some extent merely polite," writes John Updike to Nicholas Delbanco. Andre Dubus reflects, "I learned from Hemingway to stop each day's work in mid-sentence, while it is still going well, then to exercise the body, and not to think about the story till you go to your desk each day." Tobias Wolff muscles a student who does not take his craft or talent seriously enough. Ray Bradbury encourages a young writer not to take the academic route. Rosellen Brown, Ann Beattie, and Joyce Carol Oates give the reader tactics for surviving the writing life. As Frederick Busch says in his introduction to this collection, "this is a book of counsel and sustenance. . . . The readers of this book are about to receive the wisdom of those who know, from the inside of the process, what a writer might need, from time to time, to hear."