Elements of the Writing Craft: Robert Olmstead

by Robert Olmstead

Focuses on such practical writing tasks as how to begin, how to end, and how to switch from narrative to dialogue when writing fiction and nonfiction

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

About the author

Robert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an award-winning American novelist and educator.

Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.

He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. Olmstead teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in creative writing at Converse College .
Olmstead is the author of the novels America by Land, A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go and Soft Water. He is also the author of a memoir Stay Here With Me, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook Elements of the Writing Craft.[2] He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an NEA Literature Fellowship in 1993.
His novel Coal Black Horse (2007) has received national acclaim, including the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction[7] and the 2008 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction; it was also selected for the "On the Same Page Cincinnati" reading program and the Choose to Read Ohio’s 2011 booklist.
Booklist has named his latest novel Far Bright Star (2009) (the second book in the Coal Black Horse trilogy) as one of the Top Ten Westerns of the Decade; the book also received the 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Award. One reviewer praised Olmstead's ability to "translate nature's revelatory beauty into words", commenting that Coal Black Horse evokes what Henry David Thoreau described in Walden as "the indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature"; by contrast, the Mexican desert of Far Bright Star is "the place of the sun shriveled and the dried up". The Chicago Tribune review praised the authenticity of the imagery and experiences in Olmstead's writing, while also comparing his writing to that of Ernest Hemingway. It noted the influence of contemporary events, such as the guerrila warfare during the U.S. occupation of Fallujah during the Iraq War.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elements of the Writing Craft is more than just a book filled with dozens of creative writing exercises designed to energize and invigorate your own writing. Throughout the book, Olmstead teaches you how to understand the writing of others through carefully-selected examples from fiction and nonfiction books, a close analysis of what makes the passage work, and exercises designed to help you try out that technique in a safe environment.

This is the type of book that you can keep on your bookshelf for those times when you need a little help stepping outside your usual patterns. Or you can work through the book more rapidly. Whichever way you choose, you will soon find that you not only write better, but you also read better. The exercises teach you how to keep your eyes and ears open for interesting passages or effective techniques in everything you read, whether it is a fiction book, short story, essay, or creative nonfiction book.

[Joelle Byars · Rating 3 out of 5]

The core subjects are the same as other craft books: storytelling, character, setting, time, point of view, voice and language. For each core subject, he provides evaluations with different contexts, for example, providing characterization through obsessions, their tendency to talk to themselves, or how they showcase their past (which falls in line with the lessons from Brown’s How We Do It). What sets Olmstead’s craft book apart from the others is how reading-focused it is. He collects 150 literary examples to discuss the writerly techniques being employed and provides a rhetorical analysis for each along with exercises to try.

His insight on time and point of view were particularly interesting. He gives us examples of how to show character by collapsing the past and present by highlighting the consequences of the past in the present. In the passage he chose from Gladys Swan’s Carnival for the Gods, he looks at the ways in which the characters’ past “eases back into the present by recounting the toll the years have taken on her body.” This method of collapsing time, considering what we know of our characters off-page, and providing concrete detail would typically go unrecognized by readers.

Regarding point of view, one technique he illuminated was the ways in which first person point of view can be used to heighten immediacy. Typically, the differences in point of view focus on intimacy, how close we feel to the character/action of the narrative (or, alternatively, our ability to move in and out of a character’s interiority to build/maintain mystery/suspense). Though the door opens much wider when we consider how our chosen point of view can act as a companion piece for tenses: a way to make plot points more/less urgent.

Once again, like other craft books, Olmstead discusses what we do not include. While Brown, Wood, and Zinsser tend to look at more of the effect of omission on character, Olmstead brings this to setting. He gives an example from Russell Banks’ Continental Drift and points out that, “We are told what they see in context of their not seeing it.” This is the first time I’ve seen someone discuss omission as a method for establishing setting. It’s known that the amount of detail you include can slow or speed up your narrative, but to consider the “silence” or “white noise” of our setting and choosing to not include it can also help with the same mystery/suspense that omission can provide with characterization. Sure, he looks at the impacts and applications of verisimilitude, but once again, he does this through a variety of lenses.

This book is incredibly helpful for people who've read less craft books, but for someone who's been reading them for years, it was pretty basic most of the time.