A Review of "Letters to a Young Novelist"

Letters to a Young Novelist is a poignant and introspective look at the process of writing by a successful author, Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa has spread out his arguments in the form of letters to the reader. Throughout Llosa's talent as a wordsmith is evident. With just his sentences he could teach a writer, any writer, how to write in a fluid fashion. While Letters to a Young Novelist has its shortcoming-lengthy explanations and a boring middle-its positives outweigh its negatives. The book is a gentle nudge in the right direction, and when analyzed with some patience nearly ever important technique is covered.

Opening the book, Llosa explains what it takes to be a writer. He writes that money and success shouldn't be a writer's main aim. As Llosa states, "those who see success as their main goal will probably never realize their dreams." He also notes "deep inside, a writer feels that his writing is the best thing that ever happened to him." Writers tend to write about the lives they've wished they'd have lived. Writing is not only an escape, Llosa writes, at one point it becomes a necessary task that a writer must undertake in order to survive. Like a tapeworm lodged in a man's stomach the inner writer grows hungry. Llosa uses the analogy of the tapeworm to show how writer's live their lives: never satisfied and always on the lookout for new ideas to ingest.

Most of a novelist's ideas come from past memories, but he/she may alter them in such a way that within the context of a story they don't stand out. "The task of a novelist is to transform the material supplied by his own memory into an objective world constructed of words: the novel." The novel is one of the hardest forms of writing, but reading Llosa's book will reveal to a writer of anything-short stories, comics, etc.-the necessary habits and styles that should be implemented.

Llosa believes that novelists by nature are rebels. They seek an outlet that they cannot find in the real world. Through writing novelists seek justice, answers, and freedom.