Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop

Hype aside, this is a great book--the best I've ever read on the mixed motives of a literary calling. I can honestly say that, after milking it along in Columbia's Butler Library, I thanked my lucky stars I am a hemi-semi-demi autodidact: in other words, I felt as if I had just emerged through the other side of an MFA program. West's style is perfect for elucidating the nuances of a writing workshop among gifted prose stylists. My heading comes from his ideological allergy to airport reading and the oft-hideous array displayed on the bestseller lists. He doesn't mention it, but did you know the NY Times had to remove L.Ron Hubbard's Dianetics off its list because it just wouldn't go away on its own? Paul West is an unreconstructed literary snob but for my money (like I say, I got it at the library) he's a breath of fresh air! I haven't delved into his fiction but I have a sneaking suspicion his nonfiction prose could not be more more surgically suited to the pedagogic purposes displayed in full flower here. The one thing I disagree with him (if I may put it in such a non-lapidary manner) is that fiction is stranger than nonfiction. But his five-star encomium to the powers of the human imagination is a breathtaking display of what might be described as "prolixity with purpose." And yet, his core lesson in the crafting of prose narrows down, brilliantly, to a single word: contrast. (I hope I didn't ruin the plot for anyone!)

No other book which is marketed as a guide for writers is like this book, partly because the marketing isn't exactly accurate, but mostly because there isn't another writer like Paul West.If you're looking for the standard sort of 10-Steps to Better Writing manual (the kind which Writer's Digest Books churns out with remarkable speed), then this is not the book for you. While there is tremendously powerful advice for all writers within Master Class, you can't use the book for easy reference, and most of the suggestions offered are of the earthshakingly metaphysical sort (the kind you find in, for instance, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet).This book will also frustrate you if you don't particularly like to think, and don't particularly like to read anything written by someone who is smarter and better-read than you are. If you think such people are naturally pretentious, then you will find Paul West pretentious. Continue on in ignorant bliss.But if you're willing to surrender yourself to a brilliant mind and brilliant writing, if you want to dig deep into the biggest questions any writer should think about (questions of motive and meaning, of language and history, of responsibility and truth), if you don't mind obscure references and difficult concepts, then here's your book.In Master Class, Paul West gives his own account of one semester of a particularly brilliant fiction writing seminar. Since it's from his point of view, and since he was hired to be a teacher and mentor and expert, we get an awful lot of his opinions, stray thoughts, and tangential anecdotes. He doesn't, for the most part, sum them up, and certainly doesn't offer any easy formulas. But his thoughts are so insightful, his erudition so remarkable, and his perspective so clear and refreshing -- no woo-woo New Age mysticism, no "writing is the expression of the inner child" drivel, no simplifications or simple-mindedness -- that this book is one of the very few which live up to Kafka's dictum that a book should be an axe to cut through the frozen sea within us.

I read West's "memorial" to his last fiction workshop as an inspiring and heartening encounter with a writer/visionary. there are so few in our country today with a sense that fiction is going somewhere, that it's evolving, and in this book I found that indeed some hold strong to the notion still. Moreover, West shows how he tries to instill this same love of the novel in his students, by trying to cut away the well-worn ideas of craft and technique to begin at a base much closer to the beginning of writing fiction.A word of warning: this book isn't one which discusses writing with an eye toward publication, but rather it hammers home the point that writers must first of all write by impulse and above all intellectual honesty

When I had a block and wondered if I would ever get back in the saddle again, I came upon this wonderful book, packed with ideas, wit, examples, good humor, and just the right kind of encouragement. It really opened my eyes to what was possible, and that helped enormously.

This is one of the most beautifully-written and wise books about writing I've ever read. Crammed with unusual insights and great advice for writers, it's also very much a collection of character studies of the funny, witty, hard-working, obsessed, and mainly talented students in one notorious MFA fiction-writing seminar. I found their psyches fascinating, the discussions searching and at times hilarious. But, above all, there's West's magnificent prose.