A Labor of Love

Recently, one of my students asked me if I could refer him to a few good books that would help him improve his stories. At the time, I remember referring him to Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. (So as not to get off topic, I’ll blog about these two in future posts under this category.) But I’m not sure if I ever mentioned Frederick Busch’s Letters to a Fiction Writer.

Letters to a Fiction Writer was one of the first books I read on the craft of writing fiction and “the writing life.” I’ve read and reread dogeared passages from it through the years for comfort or inspiration. So it only seems appropriate that I’d share a quick overview of this book with you in hopes that you might be comforted and inspired by it, too.

In Rosellen Brown’s “You Are Not Here Long,” she writes:

The poem, the story, the novel in the hand, they succeed or fail on their own terms, by being fully what they intended to be or not–and ultimately what they wanted to be, how large, how challenging, how original, will be judged as well. Whether they sell–and if you write books, how well they sell–is so little correlated (if not inversely correlated) with quality that in the end it is only your sense of satisfaction that will define your success.

I find this particularly comforting, especially when I receive rejection letters or emails. Janet Turner Hospital addresses these rejections directly in “Letter to a Younger Writer Met at a Conference.” She writes:

When rejection slips or rotten reviews come in, I tell [students]: have one stiff drink, say five Hail Mary’s and ten Fuck-You’s, and get back to work.

LOL. I love that quote!

Lastly, in “To a Young Writer,” Joyce Carol Oates (one of my favorite writers) writes:

Don’t be discouraged! Don’t cast sidelong glances and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really ‘wins.’ The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) And again, write your heart out.

This last quote speaks to the theme of this entire blog. It’s my hope that you write the fiction that you need to write, the stories that come from somewhere deep down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you! Write your heart out!