Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction

by Richard Ford and Lisa Alvarez

Book Overview

Since 1969, the prestigious Squaw Valley Community of Writers has helped develop the art and craft of many who are now household names. Instructors such as Michael Chabon, Mark Childress, Diane... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811858219
• ISBN13: 9780811858212
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

So you want to be a writer?

Though scores of summer writing conferences have been established throughout the last several decades, one of the oldest and most respected is the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in Northern California. Founded in 1969 by novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, the Community has sponsored workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and nature writing. For almost forty years, published authors have dispensed hard-earned knowledge about the craft to conference attendees who harbor the dream of someday seeing their names emblazoned across the covers of bestselling novels or story collections. For the first time, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers shares the wisdom of some of its contemporary staff members. Edited by Lisa Alvarez and Alan Cheuse with an introduction from Richard Ford, Writers Workshop in a Book (Chronicle Books) includes essays on many aspects of fiction writing from eighteen well-published authors. Regardless of whether reading this book will inspire a beginning writer to commence or finish a full-length manuscript, it is a fine and truly entertaining addition to the ever-growing bookshelf of "how to" tomes. In the first essay, "How to Write a Novel," Diane Johnson informs us that "most people in their lives think at one time or another of writing" a novel. Indeed, she read somewhere that "90 percent of college-educated women, at one stage or another of their lives, actually begin one." Of course, very few actually get around to writing a novel because there are many obstacles including the fact that "it's an awful lot of work." But if you are willing to put in the time, Johnson offers very practical threshold decisions you must make before moving forward: "First you have to plan it. What will happen in it? Who will tell it?" Johnson identifies and explains the "[s]mall and large choices" you must make as you plot out your novel. Her advice is sound, honest, to the point, and decidedly unromantic. Alan Cheuse's piece is as wonderfully audacious as its title promises: "'Here's Lookin' at You, Kid': A Brief History of Point of View." Cheuse notes that with movies, there is essentially one point of view which "employ[s] the simple equation of camera lens and eye of the audience member, or the so-called God-like point of view." Literature, of course, has offered through the millennia many more options for POV. In examining the history of the point of view in literature, Cheuse begins with ancient Greek epic and then moves to biblical authors and then Chaucer, Dante, Herodotus, Cervantes, up through the ages to such writers as Joyce, García Márquez, Rhys and Atwood. All the while, Cheuse dissects how these authors used POV in their works and cautions that "[m]ost new writers slip and slide between third-person subjective and the general..." This essay is quite a heady (and fun) ride. Some of the essays consist of war stories which are entertaining but also offer their own lessons. For example, Amy Tan