Dimensions
135 x 203 x 10mm
Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between a word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning." From the luminescent MAKING TOAST to the fiendishly witty LAPHAM RISING, Roger Rosenblatt has shown readers time and again that he is clearly adept at the lightning.
But Roger is not only a distinguished author - for over 40 years he has also been a teacher of writing, guiding students with the same intelligence and generosity he brings to the page, answering the difficult questions about what makes a story good, an essay shapely, a novel successful, and the most profound and essential question of them all--why write?
In UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART, we join Roger and a diverse group of students for a semester in his class "Write Everything." In a series of funny, intimate conversations over the course of one spring, the class grapples with the questions and subjects most important to narrative craft: from issues of voice and point-of-view, to structure and self-editing, from the delights of anticipation - as opposed to surprise - and the value of empathy over invention.
And along the way we find ourselves falling for and championing Roger's students, who range from Inur, a young Pakistani woman, to Sven, an ex-fighter pilot.
More than a how-to for writers and aspiring writers, more than a memoir of teaching, UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART is a deeply felt and impassioned plea for the necessity of writing in our lives. Roger writes, "Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue. Each of you has his own way of seeing into suffering and error. But you share the desire to save the world from its blights by going deeper into them until they lie exposed. You show up the imperfections of living for what they are. You hope to write them out of existence."
