How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience

How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience is based on the series of “How I Write” public conversations with faculty and other advanced writers conducted by Hilton Obenzinger at Stanford University since 2002. These conversations explored the nuts and bolts, pleasures and pains, of all types of writing. “How I Write” conversations were informal, with no pretense of plumbing the depths of anyone’s scholarly expertise or art, although much was revealed. Rather, these talks probed what the writing part of these scholars’ and artists’ work entailed—whether their field was physics or anthropology or fiction—in an easygoing fashion. Participants included such authors as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson and historian David Kennedy, physicist Leonard Susskind, poets Evan Boland, Gwyneth Lewis, and Diane di Prima, literary critics and biographers Arnold Rampersad and Diane Middlebrook, novelists Abraham Verghese, Valerie Miner and Irvin Yalom, playwrights David Henry Hwang and Amy Freed, philosopher Richard Rorty, historian Ian Morris, environmental scientist Terry Root, cultural critic Rebecca Solnit, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. The chapters of How We Write follow the major line of topics that came up in the conversations: Chapter One, the different ways people learned how to write; Chapter Two, their attitudes and feelings toward writing and what motivates them; Chapter Three, what happens when a writer gets blocked; Chapter Four, the different ways people work—their physical environment and how they handle time, relationships, and more; Chapter Five, how writers get ideas and how they launch into a project; Chapter Six, the ways writers fashion arguments or create ideas, images, and stories; Chapter Seven, how style is driven by field or genre; Chapter Eight, how research connects to style; Chapter Nine, the different approaches writers employ to revise their work; and Chapter Ten, a final reflection. How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience is not a textbook or a handbook on how to become a writer. It’s primarily a conversation, a medley of voices celebrating a craft that delights and dismays each of us, and a conversation the reader is invited to join.

Hilton Obenzinger writes fiction, poetry, history, and criticism. His books include Busy Dying, Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust by Zosia Goldberg, Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco, and American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. New York on Fire, a history of the fires of New York in verse, was selected by The Village Voice as one of the best books of the year and was nominated by the Bay Area Book Reviewer's Association for its award in poetry. His sequence of poems and sketches This Passover or the Next I will Never be in Jerusalem received the American Book Award. Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and graduating from Columbia University in 1969, Hilton Obenzinger has taught on the Yurok Indian Reservation, operated a community printing press in San Francisco's Mission District, coedited a publication devoted to Middle East peace, and worked as a commercial writer and instructional designer. He received his doctorate in the Modern Thought and Literature Program at Stanford University. He directed honors and advanced writing from 1998 to 2010 at what is now Stanford's Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, and he's taught in the English Department, the American Studies Program, and Continuing Studies at Stanford. He is currently Associate Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford.