Why Write?
A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
From one of America's great professors, author of Why Teach? and Why Read?--an inspiring exploration of the importance of writing well, for creators, educators, students, and anyone who writes.
Why write when it sometimes feels that so few people really read--read as if their lives might be changed by what they're reading? Why write, when the world wants to be informed, not enlightened; to be entertained, not inspired? Writing is backbreaking, mindbreaking, lonely work. So why?
Because writing, as celebrated professor Mark Edmundson explains, is one of the greatest human goods. Real writing can do what critic R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality. Writing teaches us to think; it can bring our minds to birth. And once we're at home with words, there are few more pleasurable human activities than writing. Because this is something he believes everyone ought to know, Edmundson offers us Why Write?, essential reading--both practical and inspiring--for anyone who yearns to be a writer, anyone who simply needs to know how to get an idea across, and anyone in between--in short, everyone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a book that reads like lectures notes for a meandering college course, Edmundson (Why Teach?), a professor at the University of Virginia, attempts to answer the question of why, in an era of diminishing readership and an increasing number of entertainment options, one might choose to become a writer. Organized around different answers such as "to get even" and "to grow," the book is filled with anecdotes about canonical writers, along with personal stories from the author's writing and teaching career. Edmundson is adept at finding quotes and telling tales from the English romantic poets, Greek philosophers, and American transcendentalists, but his examples rarely stray outside Europe and North America. The book has a penchant for broad pronouncements about the literary canon "Is it possible to be a writer in America and not have dropped all the way into Melville or Dickinson, the prophet Whitman or Emerson" and the habits of "real writers" and who they may be. Though the prose is easy to read, chatty, and sometimes amusing, the book's unexamined Western-centric perspective may leave some readers feeling that Edmundson's message doesn't apply to them.
