In the middle of this book of nine essays, Richard Russo has a 61-pager titled “Getting Good.” A quote from Mark Twain tops the first page: “Almost the whole capital of the novelist is the slow accumulation of unconscious observation.”
Observation of one’s own life and ruminating on the lives and events that shape others supply much of the useful stuff a writer has. In “Getting Good,” Russo tries in several ways to explain what it means to make it as a writer. There is no set answer to this challenge, but at least Russo doesn’t tell us things like “you have to write at 5 a.m. every day” or “you have to have one space where you write and do nothing else.”
Rather, his thoughts come down to an extended discussion as to whether a writer should do what Hemingway advised: Go to a cabin in woods and just write. But, as Russo notes, Hemingway had World War I and his Paris days and Gertrude Stein’s salon to boost him before he headed to a solitary life in the north woods (and later Key West and Cuba).
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