Francine Prose

     Surely a great name for a writer. Prose.
     Not wanting to start one of the major books we have reserved for our trip, I looked at my books for something to delve into for the couple of days before we leave, and I hit on Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer--A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them."
     I remember reading it some time ago (it was published in 2006) and thinking how good it was, and I have been re-reading it with a great deal of pleasure.
     You can get an idea of the detail by looking at some chapter headings: Words, Sentences Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue, Details...  
     There is a chapter on Learning from Chekhov, in which she illustrates how Chekhov breaks all the conventional rules that writing teachers teach and yet succeeds in producing short stories that are masterpieces. She notes that, by the time Chekhov died at the age of 44, he had written--in addition to his plays--some 600 short stories.
     "Once, when someone asked him his method of composition, Chekhov picked up an ashtray.
"This is my method of composition," he said, "Tomorrow  I will write a story called "The Ashtray.""
      I have always been a sucker for these "how to write your novel" books: not that they have done me much good as far as writing any more than the odd short story. Poking around among my books, I found "The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose," by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, first published in 1979: and "The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers" by John Gardner, published in 1984.