What About The Baby Some Thoughts On The Art Of Fiction Alice Mcdermott by Alice Mcdermott 9780374722449, 0374722447 instant download after payment.

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the bestselling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer & teacher of writing.

From technical advice (“check that your verbs aren’t burdened by unnecessary hads and woulds”) to setting the bar (“I expect the fiction I read to carry with it the conviction that it is written with no other incentive than that it must be written”), from the demands of readers (“they’d been given a story with a baby in it, and they damn well wanted that baby accounted for”) to the foibles of public life (“I’ve never subscribed to the notion that a film adaptation is the final imprimatur for a work of fiction, despite how often I’ve been told by encouraging friends & strangers, ‘Maybe they’ll make a movie of your novel,’ as if I’d been aiming for a screenplay all along but somehow missed the mark & wrote a novel by mistake”), McDermott muses trenchantly and delightfully about the craft of fiction.

She also serves throughout as the artful conductor of a literary chorus, quoting generously from the work of other great writers (including Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Morrison, & Woolf ), beautifully joining her voice with theirs. These stories of lessons learned & books read, & of the terrors & the joys of what she calls “this mad pursuit,” form a rich & valuable sourcebook for readers & writers alike: a deeply charming meditation on the unique gift that is literature.