How a Writer Works

“Though it is brief, this is a demanding book. It assumes flexibility, imagination, and a certain spontaneity in the relationship between student and teacher. It also assumes a significant measure of direct person-to-person student-teacher collaboration, very much like the way a professional writer works with an editor. This is the apprentice system updated; it assumes a master (teacher) relationship to apprentice (beginning writer). In so doing, it may be ‘radical’ only in the sense that it changes the pedagogue-disciple relationship to something more realistic—and incomparably more effective.”From the Preface