Rally Your Habits: A Review of Brian Morton’s Writing as a Way of Life
Brian Morton, known best for his novels Florence Gordon, Breakable You, and Starting Out in the Evening (the latter of which was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award), has turned his skill to a book on craft. Morton, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, has published six novels, a memoir, and this book, Writing as a Way of Life, his first venture into the inside baseball of writing-on-writing.
There is no precise coordination for how this should be done, and taking writing as no mere hobby, nor vocation, but as a way of living is not an entirely new idea—“equipment for living” Kenneth Burke called it, or Leon Trotsky’s urging young revolutionaries to read Dante deeply and seriously. But what Morton has done in his book is a refreshingly original engagement with the notion of a craft book. There are no empty platitudes about how one might become a great novelist, nor fastidious childhood recalls. Morton is too clever to waste the reader’s time.
Morton leans into the baseball analogies; they could be heavy-handed but manage to be useful. The best comes later in the book, where Morton is discussing the dangers of a writer attempting mystification, and the new writer’s tendency to lean on indirectness:
In this section, I’m going to write about habits of mind—habits of mind that newer writers should grow out of. Many of these habits of mind stem from the mistaken belief that if you want to be literary, you should strive to be obscure. This belief leads us to take refuge in habits of indirectness that are the writer’s equivalent of being afraid to throw strikes. (110)
After, Morton describes a student’s experiment at a short story where none of the characters were named, the confusion adding to the intrigue of the story. While the student was disappointed with the workshop’s reception of his story, Morton remarks that the experiment was not a failure, because the student learned from it the difference between mystery and mystification. Several pages later, he declares: “Don’t nibble at the corners. Throw strikes” (120).
Morton brings a wealth of literary allusions and exemplars. Some are unsurprising: John Gardner and Anton Chekhov are familiar citations in craft writing; Gardner because of the generation of writers who came up on his book The Art of Fiction and Chekhov as an easy reach for formulaically instructive writing. Gratifyingly it is the less-anticipated tidbits of knowledge and humor for aspiring writers that creep out from unexpected sources: Lebron James, Whoopi Goldberg, and Judith Martin (Miss Manners) make noteworthy appearances with wisdom to impart.
Multi-disciplinarity is certainly a mainstay of the book: filmmakers and songwriters have wisdom to lend to a life of writing, including Sidney Lumet, David Mamet, Joni Mitchell, Thelonious Monk, but also an intriguing tangent on Sandy Denny, the oft-unappreciated vocalist from the early Fairpoint Convention albums. This piece stands out as one of the longest in the book, where Morton allows himself room to both explain Denny’s tragic legacy—agonized comparisons with her contemporaries Linda Ronstadt and Mitchell, and the feelings of inadequacy that often trouble successful creatives—and to utilize the example to warn of the entanglement of integrity, tragedy, and success. This sentiment is echoed later, when Morton muses on the suicide of David Foster Wallace as testament to dismissing the notion that becoming a famous and respected writer might cure one’s turmoil, that “external circumstances have transformed their inner landscape so much that they’re free of the woes and frustrations that besiege us. But it isn’t true” (140).
The epigrammatic length of most sections is both the book’s greatest strength and its limitation. It allows for an abundance of wisdom, of many outside quotes, a lifetime of experiences to swell and entice the reader (in addition to his success as a novelist, Morton taught at Sarah Lawrence College for many years and was an editor at Dissent for most of the nineties). The downside is there is not often room to linger on the most compelling moments, the way one might in a craft book with fewer, but longer musings. This is rectified for the most part in sections where Morton continues contemplations through multiple sketches—the sections on literary craft in particular are sustaining in this regard. In one instance, Morton cites the poet and New Critic William Empson who once said that it is in a final revision where he inserts “the careless ease.”
One of the most satisfying of commentaries comes in the center of the book, entitled “Backstory Bloat,” where the author lambasts a particularly egregious habit of program writers to overindulge in exposition. His example is a 7-Eleven being held up at gunpoint, but the teller turns out to be the assailant’s ex-lover. The scene is then interrupted with a set of satirical flashbacks, like a high school rendition of Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” Morton uses this wonderfully amusing example to remind us of some basic, but essential elements of writing, of that basic dictum of “show, don’t tell” advice all writers might do well to remember.
What is most rewarding about the book is how often it is funny. Acerbic anecdotes lie in waiting on most pages and disarm the reader readily enough that the lump sums of helpful craft-based advice one’s ego might otherwise scoff off, are more eagerly digested as sincere and serious advice. Again: this is not a self-help book on how to write. This is about the devotion to writing as a way of life. And Morton has certainly proven himself as a worthy voice to assert that devotion.
Jon Hoel is a poet and critic from New England. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, Denver Quarterly, Liverpool University Press, Massachusetts Review, Modern Philology, and Protean Magazine. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
