What About the Baby? offers 14 succinct and inspirational essays by National Book Award-winning author Alice McDermott (The Ninth Hour) on fiction writing for the novice novelist. Eschewing quick fixes and systematic how-to guides on writing, McDermott's essays focus on the big-picture concerns and realities of writing: What makes a good beginning? What makes a good ending? What makes a good sentence? What makes a reader keep reading? And what makes a writer keep writing? At nearly every turn, McDermott uses her own generous and lyrical prose to recommend patience over prolific achievement, hard work over reputational success, and valuing the truth of human emotion over the eye-catching lure of plot.
While some essays focus on more practical recommendations to beginning and emerging writers, others zoom out to consider what the writing life at large entails. In "Sentencing" and "Coaching," for example, McDermott speaks to the importance of vivid writing that honors clarity and precision. But in her more poetic and vulnerable entries, such as "Faith and Literature" and "Starting Over," McDermott explores her own writing passions, failures and routines to demonstrate how writing can be at once defeating and transcendent, full of doubt and unexpected discovery. Sprinkled with approachable personal anecdotes from McDermott's writing life and exemplary excerpts from authors such as Nabokov, Tolstoy and Woolf, this collection offers a tender but still often pragmatic set of reflections on writing. Most of all, it is a welcoming and warmhearted exploration of what it means to write (and re-write) when one finds one can do nothing else. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor