About Writing

Book excerpt: From the four-time Nebula Award–winning novelist and literary critic, essential reading for the creative writer. Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere. “Delany has certainly spent more time thinking about the process of generating narratives—and subsequently getting the fruits of his lucubrations down on paper?than any other writer in the genre. . . . Delany’s latest volume in this vein (About Writing) might be his best yet... Truly, as the jacket copy boasts, this book is the next best thing to taking one of Delany’s courses. . . . [R]eaders will find many answers here to the mysteries of getting words down on a page.” —Paul DiFilippo, Asimov’s Science Fiction “Useful and thoughtful advice for aspiring (and practicing apprentice) authors. About Writing is autobiography, criticism, and a guidebook to good writing all in one.” —Robert Elliot Fox, Professor of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale “Should go on the short list of required reading for every would-be writer.” —New York Times Book Review (on Of Doubts and Dreams in About Writing)