Monday, August 16, 2021

Charles Johnson explores the way of the writer

Charles Johnson won the National Book Award for The Middle Passage, which is his best-known work of fiction. He’s published four other novels, two story collection, eight books of non-fiction, two books of philosophy, two books of drawings, and two books of children’s fiction. He has a PhD in philosophy, worked as a newspaper reporter after college, and taught creative writing at the University of Washington for more than thirty years. In other words, he’s been around the block—more than one blocks—a couple times.

The Way of the Writer is subtitled Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling. It is a combination memoir and guidebook. The forty-two chapters, some quite short, are organized into six sections: Who Is the Writer? The Process of Writing; What Helps the Writer? The Writer as Teacher; The Writing Life and the Duties of the Writer; Philosophy and the Writer.

The book is based on an email exchange between Johnson and the poet E. Ethelbert Miller who, at the end of 2010, “asked if he could interview me for an entire year.” They discussed Johnson’s interests: literature, meditation, Buddhism, teaching, martial arts, the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., contemporary and canonical writers, films, poetry, Sanskrit, my personal habits, American history, technology, sex, race, the state of black America, the love of dogs, science, philosophy the Culture Wars, comic art, fatherhood, and the literary world. The entire exchange is available in a 672-page The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson (Dzanc Books, 2015). The Way of the Writer is a 232 distillation of that.

While it is interesting to read how Johnson came to be a writer and to teach writing, aspiring writers will find the book filled with tips and suggestions for further reading. I have made a list of Johnson’s recommendations: Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination; E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel; Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction; Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing; plus, novels and essays that illustrate his points.

He has stimulating thoughts on the craft. On words: “ . . . a writer with an expansive vocabulary is much like a visual artist with many colors at his command.” 

On sentences: “I’ve always seen the sentence and paragraph of units of energy to be released. So yes, I use long sentences for rhythm and music.” 

On first sentences: they are “as crucial as final or concluding sentences.”

On voice: “In developing a voice what the writer does is transform or personalize the expressive instrument—language—adapting and individuating it to fit his experience, his vision of the world.” 

On scene and dialogue: Ideally, it “should reveal character through the words the speaker uses and the specific cadence of his or her use of language.”

On plot: It is “the storyteller’s equivalent to the philosopher’s argument; its importance lies in it being an interpretation (one based on causation) of why the world works the way it does.”

I made a note of Johnson’s instruction to his writing students: “Determine what their protagonist most feared in the world . . . his or her deepest social fear. The one situation they most dreaded experiencing. The one event they would prefer to die than have to face. Then I told them they should maneuver their protagonist into exactly that situation to see what happens—if, in fact, he or she is destroyed by it, or is change by it and in what ways.” What a great way to think about a story.

Finally, he quotes Agnus Wilson’s “Four Rules” for writers:

1. There are no rules.

2. The first rule is wrong, so pay attention. 

3. You can’t write for an audience; the writer’s first job is to survive.

4. You can make no mistakes, but anything you write can be made better.

I would say those are worth the price of the book, and now I’ve given them to you free. There is, however, much, much more worthwhile in The Way of the Writer.

 

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