About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews (2005)

Junot Diaz recommended in an interview. It's a strange and obnoxious book about the craft of writing. What you need to know is that Delany is very smart His intelligence however is right out of Bronx Scientific. He is extremely well read and he doesn't have a whole lot of patience for mediocre writing or people who aren't prepared to work very hard as writers. The whole book is suffused with a kind of asbergers brittle impatience and - its not arrogance - but elitism. He has some astonishingly smart things to say about writing but unfortunately these are buried in the text and are never elaborated on in any meaningful fashion. He has for instance this extraordinary insight into characterization (page 77-79) and on flashbacks page 42 but he doesn't seem to have the patience to unpack what he means. He is in fact to the extent to which communication is part of the job, a bad writer. His description of the difference between structure and plot was so bewildering that I still never understood what he meant. All this is very odd because he teaches this stuff. You feel that Sam is one of those guys with tremendous insight who can't be bothered coming down to our level to explain what he means. The appendix seems to be the place where he talks cogently about some of the boilerplate concerns but that is 390 pages in. Now in fairness some of these are lectures, that is they have been re-purposed and whoever thought that was sufficient was mistaken. Ditto the letters and ditto the interviews. It might have been helpful to have had this project over seen by a stronger editor who would force Delany to focus on clarifying his ideas at greater length. Too bad. The other aspect of writing which Delany never touches - and I'm glad of that - is the role of emotions in helping one chose how to tell a story. Whether he misunderstands the role or doesn't feel it warrants his attention but given the personality here - and there is a lot of attitude - that's not a bad thing. ( )