The Practice of Writing: Essays,Lectures,Reviews and A Diary

click here for more details, find new or used items	David Lodge Our price £9.09 (£12.99) New from £7.54 Used from £6.23 Pages: 352 (Paperback) ISBN: 0140261060 Pub: Penguin Books Ltd Pub date: 1997-09-25 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 203892

Reader Reviews:

Whither The English Novel, *not* The Practice Of Writing! (4/16 people found this helpful)

Here again, in the title of this book, and in that of one of its chapters, "Creative Writing: Can It/Should It Be Taught?", we find the self-obsessed, navel-gazing attitude to writing of those who assume that the only creative writing -- indeed, the only writing at all however, creative or not -- is of fiction: of novels, and plays, and screenplays; and perhaps of literary criticism itself. (In fact, just like Fairfax et al., "The Way to Write".)

Surely the vast majority of writing that is done in the world, and in the English language in particular, is non-fiction. There is, to begin with, journalism both general (in our bulky daily and Sunday newspapers) and specialist (in the host of weekly and monthly magazines on every hobby and specialist subject imaginable). Then there are all the multitude of non-fiction books that are published every year -- though perhaps one should leave aside anything as mechanical as tables of reference and directories which, although representing a lot of hard work are only in very small measure creative; but even a new dictionary certainly involves a heck of a lot of writing, and if its compilers are not to copy the definitions from rival publications, they must surely be fairly creative in capturing each of the meanings of each word as accurately and precisely as possible and in a new way! Then there are the myriad instruction manuals for products of all kinds produced by companies for their customers; the glossy annual reports produced by big public companies for their shareholders: somebody has to write them, and to be pretty creative in trying to make them interesting, too, I reckon. There are the insurance policy booklets, and explanatory booklets about how to use today's novelty bank accounts; the holiday brochures that describe in lyrical terms each destination and luxury hotel. There are even the leaflets, booklets, and other explanatory documents written -- nowadays with an enormous effort to use plain English and remain really easy to understand -- by civil servants on all official matters from how to fill in your tax return or claim a certain welfare benefit, to the obligations placed on industry under health and safety regulations or on farmers under legislation about nature conservancy. Possibly the greatest body of writing of all is that comprising all the (no doubt millions of) internal reports written by anybody in a white collar job.

Many of the people writing all that vast body of material have to spend most of their working week writing. For the internal reports, writing might be only an occasional chore that they undertake with a groan; but for both groups, if they are conscientious, those people might well seek guidance on how to do the work of writing those documents better, and they might hope to find it in this book.

They won't.

These facts of life the likes of David Lodge seem to utterly ignore, even though one of his novels ("Nice Work", which was dramatized for television) is all about the encounter (and unlikely romance) of a young woman academic in a university English department with an industrialist, for which one might have expected Lodge to make the effort to raise his nose above his literary parapet and notice this huge amount of other WRITING that is NOT of novels, poetry or plays, being done out in the real world.

No.

"The Practice of Writing" begins with "The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?" and is about novelists like Graham Greene, D.H.Lawrence, Henry Green (who he?!), and of course Joyce and Nabokov. Hardly anybody can understand the strange games with language the strange expatriate Irishman played in Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake; but Lodge can't avoid a
chapter on him ("Joyce's Choices" is not about Miss Grenfell) which will be of about as much interest to those hoping for illumination of the practice of writing for work in the real world as a history of the cult of thousand-year-old eggs in the orient would be to a trainee cook in Torquay.

Interesting if you are studying "The English Novel" in some rarified college preoccupied with exclusively precious literary fiction, but not actually about the practice of writing.

Whither The English Novel, *not* The Practice Of Writing! (12/60 people found this helpful)

Here again, in the title of this book, and in that of one of its chapters, "Creative Writing: Can It/Should It Be Taught?", we find the self-obsessed, navel-gazing attitude to writing of those who assume that the only creative writing -- indeed, the only writing at all however, creative or not -- is of fiction: of novels, and plays, and screenplays; and perhaps of literary criticism itself. (In fact, just like Fairfax et al., "The Way to Write".)

Surely the vast majority of writing that is done in the world, and in the English language in particular, is non-fiction. There is, to begin with, journalism both general (in our bulky daily and Sunday newspapers) and specialist (in the host of weekly and monthly magazines on every hobby and specialist subject imaginable). Then there are all the multitude of non-fiction books that are published every year -- though perhaps one should leave aside anything as mechanical as tables of reference and directories which, although representing a lot of hard work are only in very small measure creative; but even a new dictionary certainly involves a heck of a lot of writing, and if its compilers are not to copy the definitions from rival publications, they must surely be fairly creative in capturing each of the meanings of each word as accurately and precisely as possible and in a new way! Then there are the myriad instruction manuals for products of all kinds produced by companies for their customers; the glossy annual reports produced by big public companies for their shareholders: somebody has to write them, and to be pretty creative in trying to make them interesting, too, I reckon. There are the insurance policy booklets, and explanatory booklets about how to use today's novelty bank accounts; the holiday brochures that describe in lyrical terms each destination and luxury hotel. There are even the leaflets, booklets, and other explanatory documents written -- nowadays with an enormous effort to use plain English and remain really easy to understand -- by civil servants on all official matters from how to fill in your tax return or claim a certain welfare benefit, to the obligations placed on industry under health and safety regulations or on farmers under legislation about nature conservancy. Possibly the greatest body of writing of all is that comprising all the (no doubt millions of) internal reports written by anybody in a white collar job.

Many of the people writing all that vast body of material have to spend most of their working week writing. For the internal reports, writing might be only an occasional chore that they undertake with a groan; but for both groups, if they are conscientious, those people might well seek guidance on how to do the work of writing those documents better, and they might hope to find it in this book.

They won't.

These facts of life the likes of David Lodge seem to utterly ignore, even though one of his novels ("Nice Work", which was dramatized for television) is all about the encounter (and unlikely romance) of a young woman academic in a university English department with an industrialist, for which one might have expected Lodge to make the effort to raise his nose above his literary parapet and notice this huge amount of other WRITING that is NOT of novels, poetry or plays, being done out in the real world.

No.

"The Practice of Writing" begins with "The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?" and is about novelists like Graham Greene, D.H.Lawrence, Henry Green (who he?!), and of course Joyce and Nabokov. Hardly anybody can understand the strange games with language the strange expatriate Irishman played in Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake; but Lodge can't avoid a
chapter on him ("Joyce's Choices" is not about Miss Grenfell) which will be of about as much interest to those hoping for illumination of the practice of writing for work in the real world as a history of the cult of thousand-year-old eggs in the orient would be to a trainee cook in Torquay.

Interesting if you are studying "The English Novel" in some rarified college preoccupied with exclusively precious literary fiction, but not actually about the practice of writing.

The expert practitioner (34/36 people found this helpful)

David Lodge is by far the best of those academics who explore the practice of creative writing and write creatively themselves. His earlier collection of essays, The Art of Fiction, is an essential primer for would-be creative writers. The Practice of Writing is a deeper and more academic collection, but entirely accessible and free from the jargon of literary theory (which has yet to contribute anything to the study of practice). The book is in two parts, the first concerned with analysis of novelists' techniques. Graham Greene, Henry Green, D H Lawrence, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov are among the subjects. The second part of the book is entitled 'Mixed Media', and concerns adaptation, screenplays and stage plays. The last item is a diary of the process involved in producing Lodge's play The Writing Game - and is an excellent record of the practical and artistic issues (and their effects on the text) that have to be overcome before a play can be seen. I have used both these books in creative writing courses for some time, and find them endlessly useful and inspiring.

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