Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks, 1955-1997

Rating:
Summary: On Price's Learning a Trade
Review: This is a great book to have around, and to dip into as you progress through Price's works -- which is definitely worth doing. It is not meant to be read through, start to finish; I have been reading the sections devoted to certain works after reading the works themselves. Pages devoted to a given work are quite specific; a familiarity with the work is very important, almost necessary. I had hoped the book would be a bit more generic about the craft, the writers Price has read, the perils of publishing, etc.; instead, the book is comprised of straight excerpts from the notebooks of a working writer, focusing on the naming of characters, motivation, structure and so on. The design of the book allows for Price's comments on his own notes -- sometimes written much later -- to appear on the facing pages, as they do in his actual notebooks. And the pages are chock full of gems such as this: writer's block is nothing more than "the writer's failure to understand his or her creative metabolism." And the book will lead you to other Price works, among which I heartily recommned Roxanna Slade,The Promise of Rest and Price's harrowing account of surviving spinal cancer, A Whole New Life. Price has a voice that is warm and distinctive, wonderfully southern, and he is not afraid to address life's larger issues -- rare among writers today.