About Writing - Samuel Delany
Filled with writing gems that defy being prised from their substrate, Delany's essays and interviews will reassure new writers and challenge old hands.
What: Delany collects his writings on writing. As a creative writing teacher and academic for many years, his writing is incisive, thought expanding, and occasionally veres into the high academic arcane, but is more often trying to be accessible to us mere mortals.
Tone: Academic but accessible in the first half, growing increasingly more esoteric. True to the title some of these are academic essays, some of them are letters, some are speeches and interviews.
Who: Samuel Delany is a creative writing instructor and Hugo and Nebula award witing speculative fiction author.
When: You feel like you’re ready to get serious about your writing and wondering how to take it to the next level. The introductory essay “Emblems of Talent” will feel like a kick-in-the-pants for writers at any level.
% on Topic: High
Keywords: Begeisterung, Talent, Plot, Character, Critique, Experimental Writing, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, Pattern, Poetry, Writing Life
Delany's About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters & Five Interviews is filled with gems that defy being prised from their substrate. There is a lot of material here, ranging from prosaic to academic to esoteric, and all of it worth your time. Honestly the whole book could have just the introduction and it would still be the best writing book I've read all year.
Samuel "Chip" Delany is a multiple award winning speculative fiction author, early Clarion instructor, and former professor of English in several NYC universities. He is a native of New York City, and identifies as African American, Gay and Atheist. His works of science fiction and essays of literary criticism of sci-fi earned him an induction into the science fiction hall of fame in 2002.
This book, as it says on the tin, is a collection of essays, letters and interviews published or written between about 1971 and 1995. It opens with an introduction titled "Emblems of Talent" which contains such a density of observations about writing that I've been struggling to encapsulate them all. Especially striking are his contrasts of good writing and talented writing.
"Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind— vividly, forcefully—that good writing, which stops at clarity and logic, doesn't" p.6
"The talented writer can explode, as if with a verbal microscope, some fleeting sensation or action, tease out insights, and describe sensations we all recognize, even if we have rarely considered them before; that is he or she describes them at greater length and tells more about them than other writers." p.7
"In complex sentences with multiple clauses that relate in complex ways, the talented writer will organize those clauses in the chronological order in which the referents occur, despite the logical relation grammar imposes." p. 7
“Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing.” p.8
Honestly, that's just three pages and it's already a to-do list for my revision and a major change in how I think about description. He goes on to talk about finding Begiesterung, a German Romantics concept of enthusiasm to carry you through the work; then how the literary landscape has changed so that it's impossible to be truly conversant with a single genre anymore (and why that's both good and bad for writers); makes a list of recommended reading; talks about why James Joyce is the G.O.A.T. of descriptions and why the more specific your descriptions the more they stick in the reader's mind; changes your whole worldview on how flashbacks work (or don't); talks about what he reads for in in a student's work; works over your concept of how to build a character; and ends with some thoughts on the role of art in society. And that's just the introduction.
The five essays are each a bit different. "Teaching/Writing" is a reflection on his first Clarion workshop, and echoes some of the 'what makes talent' portion of the intro. "Thickening the Plot" talks about the "continuous, developing interchange between imagination and notation, the story process" (p.72) and "Characters" posits that knowing less about your characters is helpful to your sense of discovery when writing. "On Pure Storytelling" is a speech given for the Nebula banquet in 1970, and covers how writing is different than oral storytelling. "Of Doubts and Dreams" is the introduction to a collection, and talks about the conscious and unconscious aspects of writing. "After Almost No Time At All..." is a critique of a young writer's story which was submitted to and published in Empire SF in the summer of 1980. Finally we get "Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student" which goes deep into narrative structures and how they affect the feeling of your work.
The letters are each fabulous in their own ways. I was especially struck by his "Letter to R" which covers the problem of building reputation as a writer, and how little that has changed with the advent of the internet:
"The lesson this leaves us with is, once again, that the only thing we can be reasonably sure will enhance our reputation is t0 write as best we can; anything else is provisional, secondary, and will depend purely on personal temperament—most likely filtered through the idiosyncratic butterfly effects of chaos theory, where the negative attempt to avoid fame is as likely to be as effective in producing some positive results as trying directly, when, as is so rarely the case, either one has any effect in that direction at all." p. 192
The interviews are where things get increasingly esoteric, especially in his two Para▪doxa interviews, the first on experimental writing and the second titled "Inside and Outside the Cannon." He writes on "The Situation of American Writing Today" for American Literary History and on his personal theory of science fiction for Black Clock. He declines to define silence, among other things, for Poetry Project Newsletter. In toto, the seven interviews create the impression of having survived an intensive graduate-level literature class as they swing references from Plato to Rolling Stone in as many sentences.
Delany ends the book with a section of "Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips" which, again, could probably have been its own book. This is more pragmatic advice on everything from dating your manuscripts (with location!), sentence structure, dialogue, point of view, all of it the kind of useful and prosaic writing advice you'd want from a writing teacher and the kind of things you'll go back and reference in the future.
There is no "overall" for this book. While the content varies wildly in tone and complexity, every section will give you something to stretch your ability. It is the kind of book that will grow with you as you grow as a writer and bears up under multiple readings over many years. My personal copy is tabbed, underlined, annotated, and growing increasingly ragged. And that's the best recommendation I think I could give. This book gets used.
