The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling was published by Scribner in 2016. The book is part memoir, part writing manual, and part philosophical meditation — organized not chronologically but thematically, around the questions that Johnson has confronted across five decades of writing: how to begin a story, how to create a character, how to sustain a narrative, how to revise, how to finish, and how to survive the life of a writer.
The memoir sections focus on Johnson’s apprenticeship with John Gardner, whose courses in creative writing at Southern Illinois University transformed Johnson from a talented cartoonist into a literary novelist. Gardner’s influence is everywhere in Johnson’s work — the insistence on moral seriousness, the commitment to technical mastery, the belief that fiction must earn its effects through craft rather than sentiment — and the chapters on their relationship are among the book’s most vivid.
The craft sections are practical and specific: Johnson discusses sentence construction, point of view, the management of time in narrative, and the relationship between revision and discovery. The philosophical sections address larger questions: what is the relationship between writing and meditation? How does Buddhist practice inform narrative technique? What is the writer’s obligation to truth?
Collecting The Way of the Writer
First edition (Scribner, New York, 2016): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12