Had the book
Stein on Writing been already around when I was still a teenager casting about for what to do with my life and with the little I knew about writing, I surely would have read it and seriously pursued a career trying to write sellable fiction. Thank God I didn’t, or you wouldn’t be reading this little essay that I’m writing right now. For if I had the talent and fortitude for it, under Sol Stein’s expert tutelage I probably would have produced the Great Filipino Novel by now—that elusive masterwork that every Filipino writer worth his or her salt aspires to eventually produce in the goodness of time—or at least a few Palanca Literary Awards for the novel or short story. As it turned out, however, I just didn’t have what it takes to write marketable fiction, and I didn’t have the patience and temperament either to labor on a novel for months or years. Still, of this I’m quite positive: Had I the good fortune to read
Stein on Writing in my younger years, I would have become a much better writer—much more readable and interesting, much more accomplished, much more marketable—whether I pursued fiction writing as a career or nonfiction instead as I’m doing now.
Why do I say all these about
Stein on Writing? It’s because this gem of an instruction book, which unfortunately for me came out only in 1995, isn’t simply armchair writing guidance from an academese-spouting nonwriter-professor who’s safe in his or her tenured perch in the university. As the author himself says about
Stein on Writing, “This is a not a book of theory. It is a book of usable solutions; how to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is good, how to create interesting writing in the first place.”
The good thing about
Stein on Writing is that doesn’t burden or hamstrung the aspiring writer with the two age-old competing schools of thought about fiction—“character creates plot” versus “plot creates character”—nor with the idea that the writer has to totally unburden his soul to come up with good-to-great writing. Instead,
Stein on Writing goes straight to the heart of the matter and shows the aspiring writer how to do characterization, dialogue, pacing, and flashbacks as well how to trim flab from one’s writing. In sum,
Stein on Writing teaches about craftsmanship in writing and how to cultivate it to a level that makes one’s fiction—and nonfiction as well—not only a pleasure to read but also a truly illuminating experience to the reader.
But is Sol Stein’s advice practical enough to be really useful? Well, you better believe it. Stein himself is a novelist with nine novels to his name, a prize-winning playwright, an anthologized poet, and the author of several nonfiction books, screenplays, and TV dramas. More than that, he is an accomplished and much-sought-after editor, one who for over 36 years had edited and shepherded for publication the works of such notable American writers as James Baldwin, Dylan Thomas, Jack Higgins, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, F. Lee Bailey, David Frost, and Lionel Trilling.
So, along with those of William Zinsser’s
On Writing Well, I heartily recommend that you make the prescriptions of
Stein on Writing an integral part of your arsenal for strong, memorable, and marketable writing for both fiction and nonfiction.
Read a review of Stein on Writing by Daniel Edelen at Amazon.com“The 12 Best Books on Writing I’ve Ever Read” by Jerry JenkinsRead Michael P. Geffner’s interview of Sol Stein about writing NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINEListen to a Books-on-Board audio recording of an excerpt from Stein on Writing NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINE Read a brief biography of Sol Stein NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINE
