Delightful clips of Tolstoy, Faulkner, Virginia Wolf, T.E. Lawrence graced the pages of this diminutive book intended to be a manual.  The author, Donald Newlove brings excellent and not so excellent paragraphs to illustrate examples of talent, or lack thereof.  Mostly, however, he holds up the good, the incredible, and the stuff that wows.

His analysis reiterates piquant  word groupings that have powerful impact.  He gives his analysis with compassion.  Truthful passages were named through out this book, and were considered for the difficulty that speaking the truth can present.

He also describes differences in word usage for a short story versus a chapter in  a book.  He says that poets should never write journalism.

Within the lines of this writer’s handbook, Donald Newlove gives lessons in reading and writing, along with an anthology of his personal reactions.  Had he been a professor, his enthusiasm would have held his classroom spellbound.

Even after skimming the cream de la cream of authors:  Alice Walker, James Joyce, J.D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, John Updike; there’s still more.  Who would expect such abundant richness in a palm sized writer’s manual type book?

Interspersed between examples were simple expletives such as,” Wow!” and quite understandably.  But then he contrasts simpler statements with sentences like the following:

“Stillborn writing wraps us in long bolts rich with writerly clauses and purple colons and semicolonnic breathstops that no friend still sober would say to us on the phone, nor do the sublime musings of Sir Thomas Browne, his rhetoric in full cry and marching down the page, promise an ideal voice for the storyteller bent on keeping our fingers from the lamp switch.”

This book addresses various writing pages as those that “sing out” or those that don’t.  This excerpt of a beginning paragraph is one that takes the reader away:

“It was nearly sunset.  High above the broad valley gigantic shafts of mellowing sunlight slanted down majestically to the earth . . .”    *from “The Reader Over Your Shoulder” (1943 by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge)

The copyright for this is 1992, but this book put out as an Owl Book, is a classic that all writers should have in their collections for instant inspiration.