Writing about writing about writing

When I received the Atlantic's 2010 fiction edition in the mail over the weekend, I immediately read the nonfiction essays first. Does that say more about me or about the current state of fiction? Okay, I did eventually read the stories, most of which are quite good even though too many of the male characters seem to have stepped straight out of Cheeverville, that mythical land where disappointed men hang out in bars and grumble about the small indignities of life while secretly fantasizing about sleeping with the babysitter. "Bone Hinge" by Katie Williams takes us way outside that familiar territory, portraying the horrible impact of a single simple decision on the life of a girl and her conjoined twin sister, two small lives opening and then slamming shut like a door on a hinge.

So the fiction was good but what really excited me were two essays. In "I Am Sorry to Inform You," Joyce Carol Oates elegantly conveys the pain and sorrow she experienced following her husband's unexpected death. A mere week after his death, she takes refuge in teaching, which has always offered hope, but she asks, "For some of us, what can hope mean? The worst has happened, the spouse has died, the story is ended. And yet--the story is not ended, clearly." For Oates, teaching and writing keep the story going after everything else seems to stop.

Richard Brausch tells another kind of story in "How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons," which suggests that there's more money to be made by writing books about how to write books than by actually writing books. Examining the vast array of books offering advice about how to write books, Brausch notes that "according to the prevailing wisdom of our time, constructing a novel or a poem or a play is no different than building a back deck on your house." The problem, of course, is that "writing that comes from those whose reading is confined to the how-to books is cramped and obvious." Too many people, says Brausch, believe they can become excellent writers by following manuals full of short-cuts: "And the industry that produces the how-to manuals plays to them, makes money from their hope of finding a way to be a writer, rather than doing the work, rather than actually spending the time to absorb what is there in the vast riches of the world's literature, and then crafting one's voice out of the myriad of voices."

The irony, of course, is that by explaining How to Write Books without The Help of Books about How to Write Books, Brausch perpetuates the very genre he rejects. On the other hand, he also points us right back toward the rest of the magazine, where serious writers can dip into vast riches and perhaps find a voice.