margaret_adams's review against another edition
Fantastic.
Quotes:
"We fiction writers talk a lot--for good reason, and to good end--about character, point of view, dialogue, scene, and summary, but in my experience, we don't talk a lot about mystery. It's not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It's not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page. Especially when there is, in our culture, an increasing intolerance for ambiguity, for Keats's famous "negative capability," in which, as he wrote, one is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn't make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is abut finding the questions. In Chekhov's famous letter to a friend, he wrote, 'You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.' Mystery in fiction resides in those carefully articulated questions, and in the unparaphrasable content of a story or a novel, the experienced meaning." - The Art of Mystery, by Maud Casey
“Volunteering to be undone is not, perhaps, for everyone. But the question is--and it’s a question every writer spends a lifetime thinking about--What do we want art to be? What do we want it to do? We don’t, for example, usually ascribe the status of art to something that does one thing. To something that is, say, purely functional. Or that is only a morality tale. Or that only gets you off. Nor, I’m guessing, do we want art only to offer guidance or comfort. Art requires mystery. Mystery--often unclear, often involving unlikable characters, always involving unanswered questions, and often seriously weird and unsettling--requires plunging the reader into that Keatsian state of uncertainty and doubt. No irritable reaching after fact and reason. The reader should, in other words, be undone.”
“Years after that impromptu camping trip in the pine forest, I asked my mother, Jane Barnes, who is also a writer, about her writing life. ‘Inchoate reaching in heartfelt darkness’ was how she described it.”
Quotes:
"We fiction writers talk a lot--for good reason, and to good end--about character, point of view, dialogue, scene, and summary, but in my experience, we don't talk a lot about mystery. It's not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It's not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page. Especially when there is, in our culture, an increasing intolerance for ambiguity, for Keats's famous "negative capability," in which, as he wrote, one is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn't make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is abut finding the questions. In Chekhov's famous letter to a friend, he wrote, 'You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.' Mystery in fiction resides in those carefully articulated questions, and in the unparaphrasable content of a story or a novel, the experienced meaning." - The Art of Mystery, by Maud Casey
“Volunteering to be undone is not, perhaps, for everyone. But the question is--and it’s a question every writer spends a lifetime thinking about--What do we want art to be? What do we want it to do? We don’t, for example, usually ascribe the status of art to something that does one thing. To something that is, say, purely functional. Or that is only a morality tale. Or that only gets you off. Nor, I’m guessing, do we want art only to offer guidance or comfort. Art requires mystery. Mystery--often unclear, often involving unlikable characters, always involving unanswered questions, and often seriously weird and unsettling--requires plunging the reader into that Keatsian state of uncertainty and doubt. No irritable reaching after fact and reason. The reader should, in other words, be undone.”
“Years after that impromptu camping trip in the pine forest, I asked my mother, Jane Barnes, who is also a writer, about her writing life. ‘Inchoate reaching in heartfelt darkness’ was how she described it.”
pattmayne's review against another edition
3.0
This is a beautifully written book, but I was hoping for more techniques for writing in the mystery genre.
Maud Casey is a spell-binding writer who really cares about the craft. That's all clear from this engaging essay about mystery in literature. She does a great job describing how to tap into that feeling of mystery, showing the audience what they don't know about the story, the world, and the characters. The examples she draws upon are powerful and beautiful and she does them great honor by conjuring up their spectral qualities.
That stuff was all very useful and fun to read, but I don't think I learned anything about writing a mystery plot. Clues and red herrings, misdirection and the process of getting characters to uncover the truth of the matter... none of this was in the book. If this was really about "The Art of Mystery" then I think she missed the bulk of the discussion.
The book is pretty expensive for its size ($18.50 CDN for less than 40,000 words), and that would have been worth it if this talked about the technique for writing mystery stories, but that didn't happen. This should have been called "The Feeling and Meaning of Mystery in Literature."
This makes me want to read Maud Casey's novels, but it hasn't taught me much about writing mystery stories.
Maud Casey is a spell-binding writer who really cares about the craft. That's all clear from this engaging essay about mystery in literature. She does a great job describing how to tap into that feeling of mystery, showing the audience what they don't know about the story, the world, and the characters. The examples she draws upon are powerful and beautiful and she does them great honor by conjuring up their spectral qualities.
That stuff was all very useful and fun to read, but I don't think I learned anything about writing a mystery plot. Clues and red herrings, misdirection and the process of getting characters to uncover the truth of the matter... none of this was in the book. If this was really about "The Art of Mystery" then I think she missed the bulk of the discussion.
The book is pretty expensive for its size ($18.50 CDN for less than 40,000 words), and that would have been worth it if this talked about the technique for writing mystery stories, but that didn't happen. This should have been called "The Feeling and Meaning of Mystery in Literature."
This makes me want to read Maud Casey's novels, but it hasn't taught me much about writing mystery stories.
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