The envelope, please.
Second Runner-Up: Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing, by Margaret Atwood (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Best lines:
“A lot of people do have a book in them — that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same as ‘being a writer’. … Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. … As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people’s projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions.”
“The readings were packed, not because people loved either poetry or me, but because they’d already seen that week’s movie. The two best questions I got asked were, ‘Is your hair really like that or do you get it done?’ and ‘How much money do you make?’ Neither of these were hostile questions. Both were pertinent. The hair question was aimed at discovering — or so I felt — whether my wild and disheveled, dare I say inspired or slightly crazed look — the right look, as everyone suspected, for a female poet — was natural to me or had been manufactured. As for the money question, this was simply an acknowledgment of my humanity: the writer has a body, which includes a stomach. Writers too must eat. You can have money of your own; you can marry money; you can attract a patron — whether a king, a duke, or an arts board; you can have a day job; or you can sell to the market. These are the choices, for a writer, in relation to money, and they are the only choices”
First Runner-Up: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (Pocket Books, 2000).
Best lines: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. … Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
The winner? Ah, that name is in the envelope we’ll open tomorrow.
