From Charles Johnson--a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America's preeminent scholars on literature and race--comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing. An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical ...
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From Charles Johnson--a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America's preeminent scholars on literature and race--comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing. An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings. For thirty-three years, Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing. The Way of the Writer is his record of those years, and the coda to a kaleidoscopic, boundary-shattering career. Organized into six accessible, easy-to-navigate sections, The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process. Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom, starting with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, and delving into the mechanics of scene, dialogue, plot and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer. What separates literature from industrial fiction? What lies at the heart of the creative impulse? How does one navigate the literary world? And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant? Luminous, inspiring, and imminently accessible, The Way of the Writer is a revelatory glimpse into the mind of the writer and an essential guide for anyone with a story to tell.
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New. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 256 p. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
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I learned of Charles Johnson through his novel "Middle Passage" and through his philosophical essays. I was taken with several broad aspects of his work, including his Buddhism, his reflections on the nature of philosophy, and his love for the United States. I wanted to learn more from him. Johnson has had a long, prolific, and varied career. In 2010,Johnson began a lengthy correspondence with the Washington, D.C. poet E. Ethelbert Miller, in which he responded to Miller's many questions about his life, work, thought, and approach to writing. Johnson used his discussions with Miller as the basis for this book, "The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling". (2016) The book has a broad scope, but its focus is on the thirty-years Johnson devoted to teaching students about the art of creative writing. The most important lesson Johnson teaches is his love and devotion to his art. He writes:
"My hope is that if nothing else, readers young and old beginners and veterans. will experience on these pages devoted to the craft, the discipline, the calling of writing. that predisposition to love the goodness, truth, and beauty found in fine writing (and in all well-wrought art). And to see that serving such a mistress for a lifetime is, in the truest sense of the word, a privilege and a blessing."
Throughout the book, Johnson weaves together elements from his own life experience with his reflections on the nature of writing. This reflects the importance to writing both of drawing from one's own experience and also, and crucially, moving beyond it. Johnson discusses his life in the book's opening section "Who is the Writer?" and throughout the work as he discusses his experiences, successes and failures, and teachers, mentors, and influences.
Johnson offers advice on the various phases of the writer's craft in three sections of the book titled "The Process of Writing" "What Helps the Writer?" and "The Writer as Teacher" with a great deal of emphasis on commitment, persistence,hard work and -- constant rewriting.
I want to discuss two particular aspects of Johnson's book. As a long- time book reviewer, I read Johnson's essay "The Art of Book Reviewing". Johnson wrote reviews to engage with and respond to the work of important contemporary authors. He states that the book review should be considered an important art form in itself, a point with which I agree and try to follow even in an Amazon/Goodreads reader review. Johnson also points out the value of quotation in a review, so that the reader may hear the author's voice. I have already quoted liberally from Johnson's book in this review, and here is a quote from Johnson on book reviewing.
"But I was not interested in my reviews being position papers. I preferred to restrict my taking of intellectual and artistic positions to my philosophical essays.Instead, and in a phenomenological spirit, the first thing I always did in approaching a book I had to review was to 'bracket' or set aside my own partisan, aesthetic positions, my personal feelings, and my own notions of what a story or novel should be." .... In a word, I always tried to review the work of others with the kind of mindfulness, sympathy, compassion, and care that I hoped reviewers would bring to my own literary creations."
Johnson addresses the complex relationship between philosophy and literature, a subject which has fascinated philosophers from Plato to Richard Rorty, in the book's concluding essay, "The Truth-Telling Power of Fiction". Johnson draws upon the work of many writers, including the American philosophers William James and Brand Blanshard, to argue that both philosophy and literature are engaged in their different ways with the search for truth and that both must take seriously language and the craft of writing. Johnson concludes:
"[W]hat we lose when philosophy takes the form of storytelling is exact precision in the presentation of a claim; but what we gain through the techniques and tools of a literature that is richly imagined and deeply felt is, as Blanshard argued, is the ability to engage an audience's intellect, emotions, and imagination in their fullness."
With my lifelong passion for philosophy and literature, I was grateful for the opportunity to reflect with Charles Johnson on the nature of language and writing through this book.
