Wesleyan University Press, 2006; $24.95 pb; 420 pages

reviewed in New York Review of Science Fiction 214, June 2006

Let me begin, as Delany so often does, with an autobiographical remark. In the early 1970s, when I was making my most important science fiction discoveries, those that would shape my reading of the genre ever after, Samuel R. Delany was one of the chief stars in my firmament. He taught me, as I believe he did many of my generation, how sensual (in both emotional and literary terms) the genre could be. As a would-be writer, when I came upon his essay ‘Thickening The Plot’ in Robin Scott Wilson’s Those Who Can, I fell upon it with glee and read and re-read it who knows how many times. It probably set back my fiction writing by many years; only after I had discovered other very different and generally more austere models could I produce anything publishable. (And only now, many years later still, do I notice the never-forgotten lessons of ‘Thickening The Plot’ beginning to re-emerge, transformed, in my writing.) But the most valuable lesson I took away from that essay was one I didn’t realise I was learning at the time: it was the way that prose could be analysed, right down to individual word choice, by the writer and hence, by extension, by the reader. It is to the reading of that essay, then, that I can probably date the birth of my career as a critic. (Coincidentally, the first review I ever wrote, three years after reading the essay, was of Dhalgren – I was generally, perhaps inevitably, in favour.)

‘Thickening The Plot’ is reprinted here, one of, as the sub-title has it, ‘Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews’ in which Delany expatiates on writing, its teaching and its practice. The essay’s siren song is as seductive as ever, but here, within the context of this book, it is easy to see why it did more harm than good to my stillborn writing career. The unstated assumption underlying the collection, the paradox at the heart of the whole issue of teaching creative writing, is this: writing is something that can only be learned by, can only be taught to, people who are already writers. As someone whose aspirations had not yet crystalised into experience, I had no way of absorbing what Delany was telling me about how to write or, more precisely, about how not to write. Because every lesson about writing comes down to what not to do, and you can only understand this if you are already a writer (a self-conscious writer) and can read the lesson as a warning of the pitfalls and dangers to be removed from your own prose rather than as a set of instructions on what to put into your prose.

It is that paradoxical awareness that makes About Writing the best book I have read on the subject, despite the fact that as a more experienced writer I now vigorously disagree with Delany on many of his strictures.

Most ‘How to write’ books operate on a very basic set of assumptions: that everyone can write, that there is a skill set which can be taught, that having learned this skill set most people will be able to produce prose that satisfies their ambitions and which is probably good enough to get into print. Despite the fact that writers have always complained about the acute shortage of venues for fiction, suggesting it’s a buyer’s market out there, the quality of most fiction published reveals that these are not high ambitions. It may be precisely because they set their sights low that most ‘how to write’ books fail.

Delany begins with a very different assumption: that there is no point in writing unless you aim as high as you possibly can, unless you are intent upon producing work that is distinctive and original because only then will writing provide the satisfactions sought. It is not a regime open to all, or indeed one that should be open to all: the most consistent refrain, repeated several times, is ‘if you can’t do this, give up.’ Indeed one of the letters, probably the most useful individual piece in this whole book, is all about the necessity of giving up writing. This is a high and lonely calling.

The letters, generally, provide the heart of the book. The essays, the oldest pieces here dating back in several cases to the early-70s, lay out the groundwork. The usual suspects are rounded up, characterisation, visualisation, making prose live. Delany’s typical technique here is to write out a brief scene, then to expand or rewrite it to demonstrate by example the point he wants to make about structure. It’s usually about structure; even issues of characterisation, of visualisation, of word choice, are essentially structural issues. Failure to appreciate that far from obvious point probably accounts for much of the damage ‘Thickening the Plot’ once did to my own writing. But it is in these examples that I now find myself most frequently arguing with Delany. Far from taking them on trust as I once would have done, far from accepting outright his assertions about what works and what does not work, I find that it is often the early, unexpanded passages that speak more eloquently to me. But that is experience speaking, experience as a reader as well as experience as a writer, the self-conscious awareness of how to do things with words ­– and it is precisely such self-consciousness that Delany is fighting for.

Having laid out this groundwork, however, it is the letters that contextualise, and humanise, the often contentious strictures of the essays. It is not so easy to read these letters as lessons on writing – you would need to be already a writer, already very clearly aware of whatever it is you are doing as a writer, to appreciate fully the gist of what he is saying – but the lessons they contain are probably the more valuable. One long letter, for example, consists almost entirely of a demolition of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, but through the detailed analysis of Morrison’s failings Delany is able to make a host of very telling points about the creation of character, setting and story. Much of what he has already laid out in the essays is repeated here, but in a specific applied rather than theoretical form, and this somehow has the effect of broadening out his points and showing them more open to interpretation and variation.

The final and by far the longest section of the book is given over to the interviews. These are far less to do with the soul-destroying, back-breaking labour of writing, and more to do with the social experience of being a writer. That is, he discusses the nature of experimental writing, what it is to be canonical, poetry and utopias, and a host of other topics which, often tangentially, impinge upon the life of a writer. The lessons here are more oblique still, and are far more to do with how to be a writer than they are with how to write. In some ways the interviews have less to do with the core topic of the book than anything else, but the two overarching lessons illustrated throughout the interviews are central to the whole enterprise. Lesson one: be committed (if you can’t do this, give up, he has proclaimed all the way through, now we see his own commitment – this is not a modest book, but then it doesn’t need to be). Lesson two, the first thing most would-be writers are told, and the last thing many of them learn: be a reader. The interviews positively bulge at the seams with references to (and often lengthy quotes from) literature and paraliterature, canonical poets and new poets, classical works and experimental works, fiction and non-fiction. Theodore Sturgeon and W.H. Auden probably crop up more than anyone else, but there’s a small eclectic library of other work running alongside them that would make an interesting reading list for anybody.

The way to approach this book is not as a set of instructions. If you were to follow the instructions, particularly those in the essays, you would end up writing in one very definite voice which almost certainly would not be your own. Rather, these are exercises to make you think more concentratedly about your own writing; take or leave the advice as you wish, but follow the impulse behind the advice doggedly. Learn to be self-conscious, to be aware, to think what it is you are doing with each word you commit to paper, and understand why you chose that word, why you structured the piece as you did, why other words and other structures would not work so well for what you want to say. That, in one sentence, is what this whole book is about. Along the way we have learned that Delany is contentious as an essayist, convivial as a correspondent, and probably infuriating as an interviewee (only one piece actually works as an interview, that is it pursues ideas in dialogue, and that is an interview conducted by Steve Erickson which is the only one that has the feel of a face to face conversation. The others all clearly follow Delany’s preferred form of a written interview, in which he uses the questions as a springboard for a mini-essay (or not-so-mini in several cases) which will respond to the question only tangentially at best, and in several cases seems to bear no relationship to what he was actually asked). In other words this is not a lifetime’s experience boiled down into a few pithy tips and recommendations, rather it is long and discursive. But for any experienced writer wanting to learn what it is they are doing and how to do it better, it is well worth following the meanders.