Samuel Delany was the enfant terrible of the New Wave Science Fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, with a number of fascinating stories. At some point, he made the shift into being a card-carrying member of the MFA-Writing Workshop-Complex, while keeping up an active role in literary criticism, experimental writing, the paraliterature of pornography, and just generally being himself. Writing has always been the central pillar of Delany's life--there is a fantastic quote where he describes at 20 deciding to be a writer and the toll it has taken on him in terms of everything else, and he's thought deeply about the big question of what it takes to produce a great novel. About Writing is his collected thoughts on the subject.

The first thing to note is that Delany carries deep psychic scarring from 40+ years running MFA workshops and reading umpteen tens of thousands of mediocre stories. In Delany's categorization, there is bad writing, "good" writing, and talented writing, all of which are evaluated by their effect in the reader. Most writing is bad: hasty drafts that barely communicate anything, hampered by blatant cliches and grammatical errors. "Good" writing adheres to a handful of stylistic conventions and has been basically proofread, and is "good" in quotes because it's had all the life beaten out of it. Talented writing is the point of the game, and is surprising, emotive, and artistic.

Talent is subjective, but for Delany it has three key fields. The first is keenness of observation, the ability to see all the necessary sensory, emotional, psychological, historical, political, etc details of the story and then transcribe them into text. The second is an awareness of the structure of this text as it relates to great art that has gone before it, primarily the romantic and modernist canon. And the third is the enthusiasm or spiritedness it takes for an author to see a text through to its end, to pull the story out of their soul like a psychological autodissection. Do this right, and the text produced will not be thin, will not be incoherent, and will be done. After that... well perhaps you have talent and perhaps this text will find its readers. Some things are out of our hands.

That's the writing advice, most of it right there, but there is a lot more in this book, some of which is repetitive (I get it Chip, you've read a lot of Romantic literature that most people have not), some of which I find abstruse, such as meditations on the importance of highly constrained experimental literature like Alphabetical Africa. Thoughts on the maintenance of the literary canon as mediated by the opinions of literary professionals as a group, and the key role of teachability in the late 20th/early 21st century as a criteria for inclusion are interesting, if peripheral. And someone looking for deep thoughts on Black, Gay, or Science Fictional literature will likely come away disappointed, despite Delany's contributions in each of those areas.

This is a long, cantankerous, and somewhat disorganized book. But it's also deep, opinionated, and charming. Original thinking and clear writing are rare gifts, a special genius out of step with the democratic spirit of mass literature as it exists. About Writing is not a path, nor even a guide. Instead it is a moment when the clouds separate and a distant peak reveals itself, glacial cap shining against the azure sky. Not everyone will reach the base, let alone the summit, but to know it's existence, to see it once, is worthy of the human soul.