Here is one of those delightful books that lure you into the pages of their fellows. Reading it, I kept wanting to send photos of pages to particular people. And to read what she’s been reading. By the end, I felt I had made a new friend.
Lydia Davis is deftly insightful about her own and others’ writing processes, the forces that shape them, and the books they bore.
In the opening essays she explains how she moved from forcing herself to hone classic New Yorker short stories to her own unique voice.
Essays One is also one of those books that make you want to write better. Like First you write a sentence or Steering the Craft, it urges you to pick up your own pen. And I mean pen or pencil here, not keyboard. Her micro-stories are snippets of delight. She shows you how other writers do things and what effect it has – till you have to experiment yourself. “Can you write the same thing in radically different ways? If you write it so differently, are you, in fact, saying the same thing?” Her thirty recommendations for good writing habits could be summarized as “observe, observe, observe.”
Before picking this up, I wasn’t aware of Davis‘s translations. Essays One includes essays ranging from her translation of Proust to John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud. Her analysis had me reaching right away for Essays Two, which focuses on translating.
This is a fat book crammed with ideas, but also a page-turner – I was drawn straight from finishing one essay into the next.
Read it – like Davis, with a notebook and pencil by your side. Essays One will keep you reading and get you writing!
Ridge Writing Retreats 