On Teaching and Writing Fiction

December 15, 2002
The prolific (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) Stegner wore many hats as a writer--novelist, essayist, historian, biographer--but the subject closest to his heart was fiction. However, although a father of the creative writing program, he composed few pages on fiction as received art and teachable craft. This slim volume brings them together, essays and interviews, published and unpublished, to provide invaluable guidance for writers of all levels. Though there is practical advice here, these pieces don't provide blueprints for building a work of fiction but rather a shopping list of the tools a good writer needs in her toolbox: patience, humility, and character. It's all stated so epigrammatically that readers who underline are advised to start with a fresh pen. What lingers is a refreshingly classic (to call it old-fashioned would imply we don't need it) sense of the writer as a well-rounded individual. As daughter-in-law Lynn Stegner writes in the foreword, Wallace Stegner might have said, "A writer must aim to be the sort of man from whom a masterpiece is possible."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)