Books on Writing

Almost every autobiography or biography of a writer I've read includes self-deprecating words about their work. For instance, I just ran across this in a book my wife and I are reading together:

Kenneth Tynan's widow Kathleen, in her introduction to his letters, states, first line,

"Writers hate to write, almost all of them." She goes on to describe, in loving remembrance, her husband "blocked in the main endeavor of a book or an article" turning to his journal, "where he might deliver himself of a self-punishing complaint about his own indolent and hateful character." Writers do chastise themselves, with seriousness and skill, as though it were a matter of personal failure not to be steadily equal to one's talent. . . ." (From Jayne Anne Phillips essay "The Widow Speaks" in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop edited by Frank Conroy (1999, p.41))

Books on writing and publishing also help me to peak under stories to see layers of thought and construction that went into the stories, as well as learning more about the problems writers encounter. For instance, it was a wonderful discovery to find 216 pages into The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien how the story that became The Lord of the Rings developed:

". . .if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. . . . Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. . ." To W.H. Auden on June 7, 1955 from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien(1995).