The Practice of Writing - Hardcover

Lodge, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713991739 ISBN 13: 9780713991734

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1997

Synopsis

Seventeen essays by the critic and novelist celebrate the contributions of his favorite authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov, and consider their influence on his own writings.

About this title

About the Author

David Lodge is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 to 1987.

Reviews

Lodge, a wry and stylish British novelist (Changing Places) and former university professor, has collected a fair sample of his literary criticism and re-formed it into an insightful and surprisingly unified look at the craft of writing. He says flat out that this is not a book of literary theory but an examination of the way writers go about their work. His aim, he writes, is "to demystify and shed light on the creative process, to explain how literary and dramatic works are made, and to describe the many different factors, not always under the control of the writer, that came into play in the process." The result is a book that should be required reading in any creative writing class not bogged down in dogma. Lodge reviews the work of a number of writers?Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Green, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Joyce, Nabokov?but the heart of the book is a series of essays on adapting his own work, as well as Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, for television, and on staging a sketch by Harold Pinter; and the diary Lodge kept while his play The Writing Class was in production. Although his nonfiction writing style is not as free of its academic roots as he would like to think and his outlook is not as satiric as readers of his novels might expect, here is a collection that is both engaging and useful.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Having retired from theory-dominated academia in 1987, British novelist and critic Lodge (Therapy, 1995, etc.) reflects on the practice and practicalities of writing for a living in this engaging essay collection. Lodge has written ten novels, five works of criticism (The Novelist at the Crossroads, not reviewed, etc.), a play (The Writing Game), and a considerable body of essays and reviews. The book's first section includes pieces on some broad issues in writing (``Fact and Fiction in the Novel'') and deft, precise readings of modern writers, including essays on D.H. Lawrence, Henry Green, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. Lodge delivers an excellent introduction to Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim, vigorously demonstrating why the book deserves to be remembered and reread. And as a Catholic, he sympathetically and informatively reviews discordant biographies of Graham Greene. There's a pleasant frankness and freshness about these pieces, as if Lodge, freed from the constraints of the university, can speak freely in a less formal voice. The pieces in the book's second section focus on Lodge's adventures in other media, including his work on a screenplay adaptation of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, and another based on his own novel Nice Work (1989). When laboring over Dickens, Lodge actually finds himself trading traditional places with his director, as he argues for a dramatic reworking of the story over any lengthy fidelity to the text. He also includes excerpts from his diary having to do with the production of The Writing Game; they display Lodge's easygoing adaptability and persistent fascination with the theater, despite difficulties with casting, rehearsals, and reviews. Lodge sums up this theatrical departure from his campus novels as ``the most intensely interesting experience of my literary career to date.'' Neither wholly journalism nor academic theorizing, The Practice of Writing offers the best of both worlds. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Why do writers write about writing? David Lodge suggests that every creative writer's psyche harbors an "analytical, formalist critic" because (and he quotes T. S. Eliot to this effect) so much of the labor of writing is the reading, questioning, and alteration of text, that is, constructive criticism. This pragmatic aspect of literature intrigues Lodge far more than convoluted theoretical discourse, a personal preference that coincides with academia's recent move away from theory toward practice. Lodge maintains this "practitioner's view" throughout his lively collection of literary essays that include discussions of his own fiction, novels by Nabokov, Joyce, Anthony Burgess, and Graham Greene, and, in a section titled "Mixed Media," his experiences writing screenplays and adapting his work for television. Donna Seaman

Lodge (Therapy, LJ 3/1/95) has assembled a collection of his previously published articles about fiction, drama, and television adaptations. The author's theme is the practice of writing, specifically, how he and others go about the creative process. He divides his work into two parts. The first examines the writings of English authors who have influenced him (James Joyce, Graham Greene) and an overview of the state of the novel today. The second part covers Lodge's experiences with adapting literary works for television and an essay on how the novel, screenplay, and stage play tell stories from different perspectives. Throughout, Lodge offers keen insight into how a writer gives birth to a work and techniques necessary to create a novel and screenplay. He also discusses the value, or lack of it, depending on one's perspective, of creative-writing courses. For anyone who wants to write the next great novel, this book should provide valuable counsel.?Ron Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., Kan.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0713991739
• ISBN 13: 9780713991734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352