One Writer's Beginning--A Book Review

        "It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experiences at those meeting points is one of the dramatic fields of fiction..."

                                     --Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginning, pg. 102 


    I used to think that there was this great mystery to becoming a great writer and spent countless hours looking for it. I thought if I only I could find it, then I could become a great writer too and so I sought it out. I could be found in that section of the bookstore where certain writers write about how to become an author and how to be published. It seemed like a formula that anyone could follow. You found this secret, you sat down and wrote your first story or your breakout novel, then you sent it in, went through a period of rejection until a publisher realized their mistake, and then you were published.  I would thumb through the many books and do my best to put it all to memory. But something about it seemed wrong to me. It didn't seem like I could picture in my mind, no matter how hard I tried, the writers that I was reading at the time, sitting down and simply following a linear formula. They seemed to be writing for more than the purpose of becoming simply a "published author". Yes, there is beauty in science and yes, there can be beauty in math and equations, but in literature, beauty is seen, but it is rare. It is not too often that you sit down with a book and are pulled into it and are lost to the story; you are no more, but can only be found within the pages of the story. I wanted this kind of secret. I wanted to write like that. I wanted the secret that Fitzgerald had, that Steinbeck had, that Anderson had, that Rawlings had, but I am also very vain. I wanted to walk into a Barnes and Noble and see my book sitting there.

    Then I read an essay about writing from Flannery O'Connor titled, "The Fiction Writer and His Country ", and I felt shamed. Most of what I desired and thought was wrong. I had been looking for this great secret and there isn't one, but there is. It is not what you think, but it instead is very simple. It is to become an observer and write what you know. It is sitting down and writing what is in your head not because you want to, but because you have to. It is about language mixing with passion until you cannot see the line that separates them. It is having to say something so much that you are brave enough to write it. I am not saying that I am a great writer, but I do now know the secret and maybe one day I too will sit down and write something that makes one become lost within a story I have written, but time will only tell.

    However, Eudora Welty also knew the secret and she is/was a great writer. She knew the secret and used it to write five novels, 41 published short stories, a volume of essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginning. She received many awards and is one of America's most honored and respected writers. But to say Eudora wrote to accomplish this or to receive all of the accolades would be very foolish. She wrote because in writing she was finally able to discover who she was and where she came from. And she details this discovery of her true self in the account, One Writer's Beginning.

   The contents of this book come from three lectures that Eudora Welty gave at Harvard University in 1983. I cannot imagine actually having had the opportunity to get to hear these from her. I hope the students soaked every second of it up. The titles of the three lectures are: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. They are the three most important qualities that Miss Welty believes that each author should have. She feels that you cannot truly write about the world around you without learning to listen and see it for it as it is, not as you perceive it. And then once a writer is able to truly listen and see the world around him or her then they need to find the courage to find their voice and write it. Eudora Welty felt that if all three of these qualities were put together then it would lead one to revelation; that a writer would sit down and write and slowly watch the story come from nothing and turn into something and that writer would be discovering each new section of the story from lay behind him and would be in constant discovery of what lay behind and ahead simultaneously. She called this the, "continuous line of revelation".

   This memoir is really about how to correctly look at life because to Eudora Welty, life was the finest form of art. She felt like there was no

  I would greatly suggest this book to anyone, both writers and readers alike. You will not find information about how she wrote or when she wrote. You will not find out how to write a story or novel and how you should go about doing so. You will not read about how she found an agent or how she got published. But, instead you will find an 80 year old woman from Jackson, Mississippi describe how she came to be a writer and in doing so discovered who she was, where she was from, who her family made her to be, the gifts her parents gave her, and lastly how she was in, "a continuous thread of revelation...."

Happy Reading,

   David