Increasingly, literature is interested in how it is done. Many authors willingly agree to open the door to their office by revealing their writing secrets, most often to aspiring writers who come to seek methods and other advice. Contrary to what its title might suggest, How to write does not have this vocation. Or not only. “ This book will not make you a writer », immediately warns Pierre Assouline, convinced that the technique can “ get you on the right track by helping you find your voice ».
The examples and anecdotes that he greedily compiles throughout the pages encourage us to devour the masters in order to better plunder them, while being wary of imitation. The approach is intended to be both erudite and uninhibited, borrowing from the texts and comments of writers from all walks of life.
Our opinion: 5/5
We learn how Hemingway countered the anxiety of the blank page, John Steinbeck’s obsession with pencils (and the electric pencil sharpener allowing him to manage the sixty that he used every day), or even how are designed the dedicatory epistles and epigraphs.
Pierre Assouline jumps from one author to another revealing their practices, their favorites, their words sometimes, while always encouraging the reader not to rely on them, or at the very least not to limit themselves to them. Casually, he slips in some advice of his own here and there, such as not to write in music so as not to risk stifling his own, that of his own writing. “ It is necessary to foresee details so probable, if not authentic, that they are uninventable “, he notes for example.
We are sometimes frustrated that the examples given are not developed or in-depth, but the exercise requires it. How to actually write this How to write ? Like a manual or an erudite stroll among the great writers (and writers)? Pierre Assouline does not choose and in a sense, so much the better. This freedom of tone offers him the possibility of sentences as miraculous as this one: “ The reader must never forget that what can be read with tears in their eyes was written with tears in their eyes. Especially at the end… » His book is devoured with stars in his eyes.
Editions Albin Michel, 336 pages, €24.90.
A story of legacies
The day after the publication of Pierre Assouline’s book, Albin Michel published another text devoted to literature and the art of writing: the Reception speech at the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium by Fatou Diome. The work opens with the welcome given to the author of Senegalese origin and to her work by the permanent secretary of the Academy Yves Namur, and continues with the tribute paid by the applicant to the one who He was preceded in seat 34 by Quebecer Marie-Claire Blais. A short, moving and enlightening text on the legacies that bind the authors.
Albin Michel, 80 pages, 12€.
