Is your book club reading THE WONDER TEST? Here are a few questions to kick off your discussion.
THE WONDER TEST examines the lengths a community will go for excellence. What do you think of the real-life academic pressures kids face? Are the pressures different than when you were growing up? Also, have you noticed any change in the way families in your community, or perhaps your own family, handle stress and pressure—whether it be in academics, sports, career, or simply lifestyle—in the past year and a half?
Lina and Rory are suffering two losses at the book’s opening, the death of two people important to both of them. How realistic is the book’s portrayal of loss and coping? What might you have done differently in Lina’s situation? What might you have done similarly?
Lina Connerly and her husband, Fred, made one choice when they decided to become parents: that they would always answer their child truthfully. What do you think of this approach? Is it sensible? Is it even possible? If you have children or nieces/nephews, how do you handle their difficult questions?
One of the primary themes of THE WONDER TEST is that the correct thing to do is not always the right thing to do. At one point, Lina says of her parenting, “I’m probably doing everything wrong. Still, it seems to work.” What is something you have done “wrong” or against common wisdom that has nonetheless worked for you?
What scene or line in the book resonated most with you? Why?
What character from the book would you least or most want to know in real life? If you had to spend a weekend with either Lina Connerly or George Voss, who would you choose?
Did you attempt to answer any of the test questions posed at the beginning of the chapters? What was your favorite question, or the one most memorable to you, and why?
Every writer must be a reader first, and the best education you can get is by reading. The most inspiring books for writers aren’t necessarily books about writing. Remember the first novel you wanted to tell others about? The first story that stuck in your mind? The first character you wished you could know in real life?
Reading widely across genres is essential. If you want to write literary fiction, reading crime novels can give you a stronger grasp on plot. If you want to write thrillers, reading literary novels can help you better understand the nuances of character development. Immerse yourself in novels, story collections, essays, poetry. Read for pleasure, and read with analytical eye. See what makes the writing tick. Those books will the foundation of your education in writing.
But when the well is dry, when you go to your computer or your notebook and feel adrift, books about writing can get you into the writing mood again. Here are seven books for writers that I recommend to students in my novel writing class, ranging from the practical to the inspiring.
First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Write, and Life, by Joe Moran
This isn’t just a book about what makes a wonderful sentence (although it is that). It’s also a book about how sentences lead us into our writing, how sentences guide us to discovery and help an idea become a story. This book is an inspiration for those of us who geek out on language and a primer for anyone who wants to know how a great sentence is made, and why it matters. Get it on Amazon.
Novel Starter: 50 Days of Exercises and Advice to Help You Start Your Novel, from the Fiction Attic Press Master Class Series
Designed to help writers kickstart their novels, Novel Starter features 50 days of assignments, prompts, and inspiration, arranged in a progression to help you get the most out of your writing practice. Ten-minute prompts help you break through writers’s block, generative exercises help you write scenes and chapters, and craft keys demystify the fundamentals of narrative craft. If you want a 50-day boot camp to get your novel off the ground, this is the book for you. Get Novel Starter on Amazon.
Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in The Writer’s Life, by Bonnie Friedman
According to Friedman, “Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences, they are the ones who keep writing.” While the other books on this list focus on narrative craft, Writing Past Dark is the book you’ll turn to when you feel gobsmacked by your novel, and you’re not sure how (or why) to continue. Get it on Amazon.
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, by Patricia Highsmith
You don’t have to be a writer of crime fiction or thrillers to learn a great deal from this slim, to-the-point guide on creating suspense in fiction. Highsmith’s advice on everything from plotting to getting past “snags” is invaluable to novelists in any genre. As a writer of literary fiction, I found that it provided me with a much-needed kick in the pants. Get it on Amazonor Bookshop.org.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Listen to this audiobook whenever you think, “Why am I doing this? Can I really do this?” Gilbert is like a cheerleader standing on the sidelines of your writing life. Get it at Bookshop.org or Audible.
The Apprentice Writer: Essays, by Julian Green
A refreshing, wide-ranging collection of essays by a French-American writer. While the essays cover various subjects such as translation and Paris neighborhoods, the book is worth reading for the essays “How a Novelist Begins,” “Where do Novels Come From?”, and “Lectures on Writing.” This one isn’t that easy to find, but if you do stumble across it, be sure to buy it!
On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King
By the time I got around to reading this modern classic by one of the most prolific writers of our time, I’d already published three novels. I wish I’d found it sooner! While King’s smart, down-to-earth memoir/writing lesson is a must-read for beginning novelists, fiction writers at any stage of their careers will find much to admire and be inspired by. Consider it a crash course in how to write fiction that people want to read. Get it at Bookshop.org or Audible.
Letters to a Young Writer, by Colum McCann
This wide-ranging book by Pulitzer Prize winning author and long-time teacher McCann is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read on writing. McCann talks about how to focus on the work instead of the ego, how to get past envy, how to work with an agent, and why exhaustion is an essential part of the writing process. If you’re in a slump, this brilliant little book will pull you out of it. Get it on Amazon or Bookshop.org.
In Consent, Vanessa Springora delivers a heartbreaking, startling account of her adolescent relationship with one of France’s former literary stars, Gabriel Matzneff, when Matzneff was 50 and Springora was only 14 years old. What stands out in this memoir is the complicity of adults in Matzneff’s crimes. Springora’s mother, famous philosophers, renowned television personalities, politicians, and many in the literary establishment were not only aware that Matzneff was grooming young adolescent girls and boys; these powerful and respected people heaped praise upon the novels and diaries in which Matzneff chronicled his abuse.
After decades of torment and stalking, seeing her name and likeness used in book after book to enhance her abuser’s literary reputation and fame, Springora finds the strength to tell her own story and take hold of the narrative. A clear picture of the toll sexual abuse takes on survivors, and a stark rebuke of the ingrained culture in French intellectual circles that condoned and celebrated the abuse.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to personal narratives–particularly memoirs of the writing life. I keep coming back to books that are not about writing so much as about the daily experience of being a writer, the act of making one’s way through everyday existence (children, roof leaks, marriage, moving) while attempting to inhabit a life of the mind.
When my writing comes to a halt, personal narratives by writers help me get back to that coveted interiority, the quiet brain space necessary for the act of making something. Every one of these books tripped some invisible wire and sent me back into writing.
I discovered Deborah Levy while living in Paris, thanks to a tweet by a fellow expat from California, Summer Brennan. When I say “discover” I really mean I came upon her very late, after apparently everyone had already been reading her books for years. Brennan’s tweet inspired me to seek out The Cost of Living at Galignani Bookstore on Rue de Rivoli. I devoured it in the way I devour a very specific kind of book: the kind that I have to stop reading every few pages because it inspires me to sit down and write. If I remember the timeline correctly, soon after I bought The Cost of Living, Paris shut down for our first lockdown (or was it our second?). Paris was so tightly locked down that Galignani, Shakespeare and Company, and Red Wheelbarrow weren’t even shipping books, so I had to wait for things to reopen to go back to Galignani for Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing.
When I recently saw that Levy had *a new book on the way I did backflips (not like Simone Biles, more like backflips in my mind). In her latest volume, a companion to The Cost of Living and Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy muses on the “unreal estate” she dreams of owning—a rambling home overlooking the sea, with pomegranate trees and all sorts of diversions. In reality she lives in a small flat in London and writes in a damp shed (this book finds her in a different shed than she used in Things I Don’t Want to Know.) Her Best Male Friend returns in this book, acting in ways that may disappoint the reader (cheating on the long suffering Nadia, for example), but never fail to entertain.
Taken as a set, these three books allow the reader to enter Levy’s life at different moments, as though looking through different windows on a moving train. Through her engaging, self-deprecating, wide-ranging voice, one glimpses intimately the sweep and tilt of one woman’s literary life. A joy to read.
It is hard to live an intellectual while literally attached to an infant, a truth the author discovers while simultaneously breastfeeding and preparing for a panel in a bathroom stall abroad. Zambreno writes beautifully of the universal struggle–how does one make art while caring for a family?–in this spacious mediation on reading, literature, and friendship. Central to the story is the author’s former online friendship with a poet/novelist from San Francisco. I read this part with great interest, scouring the internet for clues, as Zambreno and Alex Suzuki (the alias for the friend with whom she corresponded) spent a lot of time in Readerville, a community in which I was also active while living in San Francisco at during the same years.
Undertaken at a time when the author is struggling to write a different book, for which she is on contract–a study of Herve Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life–the book concerns friendship, the friction between writing and making a living, and the disruptions of the body. While revisiting Guibert’s chronicle of his life (and death) with AIDS, Zambreno is contending with shingles and other mysterious illnesses.
I read the book not long after returning from two years in Paris, a city that is central to Guibert’s work. Had I not read To Write As If Already Dead, I would not have read Guibert, and reading Guibert was a joy. Books speak to each other across genre and geography, just as authors speak to each other and to readers across time, so I am always fascinated by the way certain books come to you at the moment in your life when they are most relevant. We rode out the first year of the Covid19 pandemic in Paris. Guibert was caught in the turmoil of an earlier virus. His work is especially interesting to read at this moment in history.
With references to the works and lives of the likes of Baudelaire and Foucault, Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life’s complexities. Wonderful, thought-provoking, and unexpected. If you want to write and read but find that your mind is always pulled elsewhere by something or someone else, this book is calling your name.
A worthy addition to any writer’s bookshelf and a joy for those of us who return again and again to Camus. Through these deeply personal essays one glimpses the person and mind behind The Stranger and The Plague, the inner workings of a writer’s mind at work. We see his childhood in Algiers, and learn how that experience formed the moral basis of his work.
In her latest collection, Minot rages artfully against distraction of political and romantic varieties. The stories are as sharp and elliptical as the sentences. If you’ve been a fan since way back (Lust & Other Stories), this one won’t disappoint.
Anyone who has been young, female, and broke, full of longing for love and a creative life, will likely see herself in this novel. Absorbing and at times sharp-edged, a raw look at what it means to move through the world as a young woman with big dreams. Every sentence feels close to the nerve endings. I read it in two sittings.
In prose that is at once concise and evasive, filled with blank spaces and unanswered questions, Yiyun Li speaks movingly of the need for privacy and the absence of a sense of self, laying bare intimate details of her life and psyche. A contemporary companion to William Styron’s classic Darkness Visible.
Michelle Richmond is the author of seven books of fiction, including most recently the Sunday Times bestseller The Marriage Pact. Her new novel, THE WONDER TEST, will be published by Grove Atlantic in July.
*Thanks to Netgalley and to the publishers for making several of these books available prior to publication in exchange for an honest review.
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