Like Shaking Hands With God
with Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer
Washington Square Press

Keep it as short and clean as possible. Keep your audience engaged. Get to the point, communicate with grace and honesty, and be true to your own intellectual passions.

Tell a story.

Some of the essential maxims of writing are the first things to go out the window when books about writing are written. There are few things as painful as reading an overblown, self-reflective monologue about writing, but "Like Shaking Hands With God" manages to avoid every possible pitfall.

"Like Shaking Hands With God" springs from two conversations between authors Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. Vonnegut is pretty well known, of course. Stringer, however, is a surprise: He's the formerly homeless, formerly crack-addicted writer whose first book, "Grand Central Winter," was compared by Vonnegut to the work of Jack London. "Like shaking hands with God" is how Stringer describes making a breakthrough while writing, a description that may strike other writers as being curiously apt.

Stringer quickly emerges from the book's pages as a warm, thoughtful and serious writer, and a perfect sparring partner for the very witty, very human and occasionally caustic Vonnegut. Vonnegut's tired but intense idealism sparks expansive riffing from Stringer, a new writer still amazed by the art's potential, and the rapport between the two is as engaging as the topics they ramble through, expound upon and pick apart.

Unlike the overwhelming majority of books about writing, "Like Shaking Hands With God" is almost completely free of bullshit. Vonnegut and Stringer talk about the relationship between writing and real life. They talk about the beauty of music, the therapy of being able to retreat into a world of words, and the pain of writer's block. But they do it with such straightforward grace and good-natured humor that this book is able to express in 80 little pages wisdom it might take an English major volumes to eventually cough up between bouts of phlegmy, self-indulgent jargon-packed windbaggery.

That a publishing house had the sense and courage to publish such an engaging and challenging conversation is a minor miracle, and one that both readers and writers have a duty to consider, and a golden opportunity to support.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)