On Being a Writer

by Bill Strickland

Thirty-one interviews drawn from three decades of "Writer's Digest" magazine offer revealing glimpses of how many prominent American writers work

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Essays

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Gayle Pritchard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read, if somewhat dated.

[Toni Wyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of interviews and one letter with authors of renown. A lot of the interviews took place between the 60s and 80s. Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean Auel, Madeleine L'Engle, and many more.

There is much to be gathered here for the writer, but there are also many things to avoid. While the nuggets of wisdom are fascinating, the narcissism and male chauvinism is rampant. It wasn't a good look then, and it's really not a good one now.

Worth reading for the insight. Just have a trash basket handy for the bull.

[Jessica Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the interviews with various authors.

[Kirti Vyas · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many wise and wonderful views on writing and how the many admirable voices that defined great literature were able to accomplish it. A book of author/poet interviews to savor slowly.

[Alan Gardner]

Great motivations for writing. Many well-know writers who have made it. Plenty of trade craft.

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of author interviews from the 60s-80s. Some quotes:

Marsha Norman: “To support myself as a playwright, I write movies, which is what most successful playwrights do to earn a living. When you have gained national success in the theater, it’s like being awarded a gold medal in the Olympics. If you’re a skater, you can look forward to a job with the Ice Capades. It’s the commercial version of the art.”

Hemingway, when asked about the rumor that he takes a pitcher of martinis to his writing room every morning: “Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes, and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he had his first one.”

Kurt Vonnegut: “I have always thought of myself as a novelist, not a science fiction writer, not a black humorist. Science fiction is a story with machines. There’s no reason it should be a separate category, except that people who don’t know anything about machines think it should be. They get embarrassed. They hope it’s not really literature.”

Ray Bradbury: “If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.”