Outline

Outline by Rachel Cusk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A kind of experiment in the erasure of the conventional trappings of fiction – plot, suspense, character, identity. Cusk has thought hard about the building blocks of the novel and has tried to pull most of them out. What’s left are outlines of people’s lives, observed and recorded by a narrator whose life and personality are outlined by those other lives and their stories. The book is upfront about its method, and its themes emerge naturally from it – the comparison and contrast between the people in the novel suggest the relational way we think about ourselves, as well as the difficulty of bridging the fundamental difference between individuals (particularly women and men in heterosexual relationships). The book sums this up in its very last lines, where a character confuses “solitude” for “solicitude”, capturing the twin fates we face when trying to understand each other.

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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not as compact as the author makes out (he is a storyteller after all), but still very useful not just to aspiring writers but those who wish to understand how novels are put together. King's practices are not universal, but it's still interesting to see the way he approaches the craft – starting with characters and a situation and letting that play out, and not being fixed on the way his stories will resolve. The plots of his books are not overdetermined, but unfold naturally, keeping the author (and he hopes, his readers) guessing. The themes of the book also emerge naturally once the first draft is complete – King steps away from the manuscript, comes back to it with fresh eyes and then tugs the loose ends together to form a satisfying whole. His books are not novels of ideas, in other words. The story always comes first. Then again, King doesn't claim to have a monopoly of wisdom on the subject of writing, and there's an endearing sense of humility to this project. It's a plain-spoken, personal and honest account of the job.

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