What Can Margaret Atwood Teach Us?
About writers and writing
This is the third book that offers writing advice, which I have reviewed, recapped, and shared as we navigate our writing adventures together.
Following this recap, find #1 and #2 linked below.
Now, let’s see what Margaret Atwood teaches us in Margaret Atwood on Writers and Writing.
As I do, you must wonder if there is anything that Margaret Atwood is not good at. She successfully writes fiction, non-fiction, short stories, children’s books, novels, and graphic novels.
She’s a poet, scriptwriter, editor, and playwright.
Having devoured Margaret Atwood on Writers and Writing, in one sitting, I can confirm (as she does in chapter 1), that she was never really, very “good with an ax.” Apparently, she was also a lousy shot with a 22 rifle.
The porcelain cracks! The portrait peels! We have found the fault.
Atwood starts with a basic question, forcing you to ask yourself, “Who am I?” You’ll falter here, tripping over self-imposed labels: writer, author, novelist, memoirist. Writer-wannabe?
On page 27, she’ll ask you again, “Who do you think you are?”
She wants to make sure that you know what you know about yourself. She is writing about writing, but don’t be fooled, she is categorically writing about the writer living a writer’s life.
This book is dense. It is dense not because of the length nor the ideas, but because Atwood forces you to push through the fog of how you see yourself as a writer and how you live as a writer.
Once you’ve figured that out, it is already too late; Atwood reminds us that writers never step into the same paragraph twice. We change as writers, as does our relationship with the reader.
She remembers for us the first printed series she produced. She was a child, it was a badge-earning exercise for her Brownie troupe, and an early spark that would ignite her lifelong creativity.
She describes for us her early days as a young poet, the climate of the Canadian poet community in the 50s and 60s when poetry lovers looked to Europe for inspiration rather than at the end of their noses.
She reminds us that she, too, had to haul her books to small towns on the bus, with hopes to sell them at readings.
She speaks of the writer as the eyewitness and their books as the go-between from writer to reader. Then she sneaks up on you on page 118 with the question, “For whom does the writer write?”
BAM!
For whom do you write? Put a bookmark in and sit and stare out the window to let that settle.
Margaret Atwood on Writers and Writing is not a how-to piece with tips for constructing stories. Rather, it forces you to think of how your stories evolve.
Atwood suggests that if you are intent on writing about monsters, you must allow yourself to go where the monsters are.
Will you?
*****
My first recap was Save the Cat! Writes a Novel found here in The Wordy Wombats.
My second recap A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty is here in Creative Writing 101
