Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop Review

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(More customer reviews)No other book which is marketed as a guide for writers is like this book, partly because the marketing isn't exactly accurate, but mostly because there isn't another writer like Paul West.
If you're looking for the standard sort of 10-Steps to Better Writing manual (the kind which Writer's Digest Books churns out with remarkable speed), then this is not the book for you. While there is tremendously powerful advice for all writers within Master Class, you can't use the book for easy reference, and most of the suggestions offered are of the earthshakingly metaphysical sort (the kind you find in, for instance, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet).
This book will also frustrate you if you don't particularly like to think, and don't particularly like to read anything written by someone who is smarter and better-read than you are. If you think such people are naturally pretentious, then you will find Paul West pretentious. Continue on in ignorant bliss.
But if you're willing to surrender yourself to a brilliant mind and brilliant writing, if you want to dig deep into the biggest questions any writer should think about (questions of motive and meaning, of language and history, of responsibility and truth), if you don't mind obscure references and difficult concepts, then here's your book.
In Master Class, Paul West gives his own account of one semester of a particularly brilliant fiction writing seminar. Since it's from his point of view, and since he was hired to be a teacher and mentor and expert, we get an awful lot of his opinions, stray thoughts, and tangential anecdotes. He doesn't, for the most part, sum them up, and certainly doesn't offer any easy formulas. But his thoughts are so insightful, his erudition so remarkable, and his perspective so clear and refreshing -- no woo-woo New Age mysticism, no "writing is the expression of the inner child" drivel, no simplifications or simple-mindedness -- that this book is one of the very few which live up to Kafka's dictum that a book should be an axe to cut through the frozen sea within us.

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