Cherise Wolas's Reviews > What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

Not an aspiring writer how-to, but essays and a speech McDermott gave, filled with wisdom, style, wit and humor, and a bit of memoir, that might be as interesting for serious readers as they are for writers - serious writers might find useful suggestions, ways of thinking, reminders perhaps, aspiring ones might unlearn bad lessons and shuck bad advice. The truth is writing is a compulsion, and one can't be taught to be a writer, but a writer can become a better writer, and readers can become better readers, with a clearer sense of what a writer is doing, the care taken, the depths to which the story or novel goes, to see beyond what has become more status quo - readers seeking out books with "relatable" characters, characters who would be their friends, receiving confirmation of themselves in the pages, rather than seeking out writing that is fuller and does more, goes further. And writing that is fuller and does more and goes further does not mean stories and novels that are incomprehensible, but rather possess that timelessness, which is one mark that separates the prosaic from the more rare. The essays include passages by Dickens, Faulkner, Nabokov, Woolf, and others, with suggestions about how to think that are applicable not only to writing but also to life - the pursuit of individuality, clarity, sincerity, tenderness, attention to the details, what is salient and what is not, sowing the seeds, looking for consequences, for patterns. I found lovely and thoughtful validation in McDermott's words for how I myself work. Strangely, I've not read any of her novels, and it might be time.