Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing by Douglas Glover

Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing Reviews

• 
  Justin Tate

  First 80 pages contain the most well-articulated writing advice I've ever encountered. Particularly his Do This, Don't Do That approach. Great for those of us who become easily flustered by the endless ways to write a novel. Of course it helps that my own strategy meshes well with his suggestions.
  
  I fell in love with his rants on common failures of student writing, their lack of commitment, and the challenges of being a writer in a 'post-literate' society. Glover's greatest strength is his observations on how to make theme work in a mainstream way. He is obsessed with literary art, yet equally as obsessed with clarity. Only fools dress their characters in white and expect the reader to realize it's some kind of message on purity. At the same time, there is a place for texture and dramatic symbolism and he shows you how to do it.
  
  The back half is a snooze, unfortunately. Pages and pages of literary analysis of obscure titles which don't even sound interesting. Much of his analysis contradicts the brilliant approach outlined in the beginning half. Still worth the price of admission for those first few essays. Will keep this book close to my heart and revisit it often.
• 
  George Ilsley

  There’s a lot going on here and I’ve rated it too harshly. Partly because I didn’t read half of it. Nothing is less interesting than discussing books I have not read.
  The first few chapters, though — wow! How to Write A Novel (read good books). How to Write A Short Story (seems a matter of math in this analysis). The Mind of Alice Munro is a meandering read, and I dug our and reread Meneseteung, which I enjoyed; reading a work of literature is usually more rewarding than reading about literature.
  
  [In all his emphasis on “flow” in Munro's short story Glover somehow avoids mentioning menstruation as a theme, even though from my reading that plot point is unavoidable.]
  
  In literature rules are made to be broken, but Glover seems completely confident proclaiming absolutes. Readers must be skillful in applying or ignoring rules.
  
  As an aside, I just read Timothy Findley’s
  The Wars, and everything Glover says about the layers of voices in Meneseteung applies to The Wars.
• 
  Sephy Hallow

  So, some of this is incredible writing advice, and I love it. However, two sections are terrible: namely, "Thoughts on Writing Well in a Post-Literate Age" and "Before/After History and the Novel." The first is snotty, elitist tripe about the degradation of grammar and how no-one reads any more (which is patently untrue, as the author, a novelist, should have enough evidence of). It comes across as classist and describes our world as "post-literate", arguing that people aren't smart enough to read books because they don't know the Latin terms for certain literary devices, and by that same measurement they definitely aren't smart enough to write them - especially not his own students, who he takes sadistic delight in haranguing. However, that is far more forgivable than the second essay I mentioned, wherein Glover presents a pseudo-historical argument that effectively supports colonialism by arguing that indigenous cultures were wiped out because of a lack of writing, amongst other things, and that writing itself shaped the popular understanding of time, with no acknowledgment of the actual timeline of books or common literacy. This is completely ahistorical, as many indigenous cultures had non-oral methods of recording information and stories (including writing). It supports a white supremacist view of colonialism, wherein the destruction of a culture was inevitable due to its failings (not deliberately imposed by its invaders). It has nothing to do with writing, and is just a strange, racist spiel inserted into what was meant to be a craft book. For that reason, even though a lot of Glover's thoughts on rhythm and symbolic repetition in novels are extremely useful (and so far unique in my studies of creative writing), I cannot recommend anyone read this book.
• 
  John Hanson

  Is pulp fiction a complete bore? Is most literary fiction a letdown? Can you feel Alice Munro or Rawi Hage's incredible imagery and not have a clue how they do it? Do you believe there is more to the advice that sounds like "use active verbs," "vary your sentence length," and "either advance your story or your characters?" Do you believe there are secrets to writing well, secrets that can be learned?
  
  Then this book is for you.
  
  Read is essay "The Novel Is A Poem" first. If it intrigues you, then read this book. If not, then don't waste good writers' time.
• 
  Tiara

  The best book on writing that I've read and I've probably read them all. Glover is not overly
  prescriptive but provides practical craft instruction for stories and novels. His aim is to teach writers to read as writers, to encourage student writers to master the subtleties of English grammar and usage, and to show basic structures that underlie most fiction. He is a brilliant teacher and a brilliant writer who now offers unique and useful info on writing.
• 
  Robert Nolin

  Glover has some very unique and helpful advice about the writing craft. It's only when he strays outside that lane that the book suffers. Also, like John Gardner, he tends to be a scold. Discovered his essay in
  Words Overflown By Stars: Creative Writing Instruction And Insight From The Vermont College MFA Program.
  
  Side note: interesting that a professionally-published book made it out the door with so many typos and errors. Walter Louis Stevenson? Was that Robert's brother?
• 
  Kiki

  I bought this book for its essays on how to write. Having finished those, I'm as close to finished as I'm ever likely to be, so my comments are on those essays (mainly "How to Write a Novel," "Attack of the Copula Spiders," and "The Drama of Grammar").
  
  The author is an insightful guy. There are a few great nuggets of wisdom here that I was happy to find. However he suffers from a malady common to many good writers -- often they have a good FEEL for how to write, but no scientific thought process to organize it, so they don't do well at putting it into words. Ironic. I've long thought that creative writers would do well to take a couple of engineering courses. Nevertheless, if you already know a good bit about writing you should be able to parse his ideas and take away useful concepts.
  
  And finally, before I go, I must quibble with his rant on how Kids These Days don't know any grammar. I have to agree. The education system in many areas has abandoned any teaching of HOW our language is put together -- that thing we call grammar. But if the author wishes to direct his ire somewhere, it should not be at the kids. The guilty parties are the adults in the education system, of which he is a member. He should remember that, and also remember that these kids are his most likely audience. Instead of lambasting them for their lack of knowledge, he should BE A TEACHER, and take the five seconds necessary to define a "gerund" before he starts using the word.
  
  
  
• 
  Julia Brown

  My initial impressions of Attack of the Copula Spiders was that the book was too prescriptive.
  
  But, the more I read, the more I realized how fantastic its prescriptions are! Glover gives wonderful, nuts-and-bolts suggestions here for improving the quality of story drafts. He even offers and exercise for building a draft from scratch.
  
  I'll be an MFA student in the fall, and Glover has impressed upon me that the study of grammar and vocabulary are equal in importance to the study of the writer's craft.
  
  Good stuff.
  
  ****EDIT: I now have this book on permanent rotation. I'm HIGHLIGHTING and UNDERLINING (I usually don't write in books unless it becomes absolutely necessary). This is worth a jump up in star.
• 
  Alexis

  The first few essays in this book are some of the best essays that I have read about how to write in recent years. Glover really breaks it down and talks about craft- sentence structure, image patterning, language and the power of verbs. It was a master class. I would recommend that everyone who teaches writing read these essays. These are not essays for the beginning writer, but for someone who has moved beyond the position of novice.
  
  After these first few essays, Glover then turns to discussing specific books that I haven't read, and I stopped reading. I would have loved a book that consisted of just his essays about writing.
• 
  rory

  It's refreshing to see an emphasis on close reading and the possibilities opened up by small choices at the sentence- and word-level.
• 
  b

  I actually read this a few years ago, and finished my reread a little while back but forgot to rate it here. DG’s nuts and bolts are very very usable. The craft components are so invaluable and worth the book’s price alone. DG’s special interest essays—as most of what got published by everyone on Numero Cinq over the years it ran—are hit and miss. Notes on how to read a Mark Anthony Jarman story is really good, as is the appraisal of Munro. But other stuff is just so not useful and possibly so obfuscated that it’s not worth reading. The title essay is a big “old man yells at cloud in sky” kind of address, but it has a lot of useful information, like if you don’t care about your prose, no one will. What Glover assumes in the title essay is that students don’t actually know how to read complex writing anymore, and that this is the reason they proof things poorly in writing workshops, but what someone should tell him is that the reason English students don’t have a handle on sentence structure and how fiction works is because 4/5 of them in any given seminar didn’t do the reading that week (partly the program is to blame for letting narcissistic idiot teachers who also haven’t read the book (or read it meaningfully any time recently) run a supersaturated syllabi), and are mostly performing a kind of passionate version of what they think someone who loves reading would argue. I continually see my colleagues parrot a professor’s readings and theoretical crutches and do great in classes, only for them to share with me that they haven’t read the book at all, because they had a really busy week, or needed time for self care, or they had to travel for a wedding, or they _____—life happens, and the reading schedule doesn’t permit us doing good readings, but when you only read one book deeply for one major paper per semester, it makes someone like me (who reads every book for every course completely, plus most of the additional readings) feel like a real jackass, because why should we bother? I was fortunate enough to have DG look at my writing years and years ago during my undergrad when he was writer in residence, and he was really kind and useful and gave me a great reading list (which I’m still slowly moving through). If you’re wanting a different kind of gruff “tells it how it is” voice to guilt you into writing better short fiction and novels, this is probably the go-to craft book. On top of this, there’s a really great essay by Julie Jones on Numero Cinq, I think called “unconventional plots for weird stories” or something to that effect, and it uses a lot of DG’s principles to look at very good strange short fiction.
• 
  Carol Schaal

  While reading this, I felt like I was back in grad school. That's a good thing. Insightful essays on grammar, sentence structure, style, writing novels and short stories, etc. etc. Glover is a bit of a writing wonk, so he may not speak to all.
• 
  Aaron Cohen

  Saving a few of these essays until I read the source material, but the bulk of it I read -- and was blown away by the challenge as well as the rigor of the craft essays and insight of the criticism -- want to read his fiction.
• 
  L. Hues

  Some great stuff in a few of the chapters and some chapters that are among the most boring I’ve read. But I’ll keep my copy and I’m a few years I’ll read it again with hopes something previously boring will strike me as brilliance.
• 
  Al Kratz

  Worth it for the first couple chapters alone. I will be returning to this one a lot as a refresher.
• 
  Nika Teran

  So many important questions, some answers, too. To be read over and over.
• 
  Pooker

  My house is huge. Viewed from the outside, I suppose it occupies pretty much the same space as any other ordinary house but what is not readily apparent, from the outside or from within, is the number of people it actually houses. Hundreds. Maybe even thousands. Authors all. Well, all except me. But that's just a matter of time. Almost everyone I've ever read lives at my house, my all-time favourites (Margarets Atwood and Laurence, Alice Munro) following me about from room to room, competing for mirror space in the bathroom, lifting pot lids in the kitchen. Other favourites (Bergen, Birdsell, Shields, Snyder, Coady, Coyote, deWitt, De Sa, Babiak, Barfoot, Johnston, Jarmon, Callaghan, Cole, Vanderhaeghe, Valgardson, Moore, Mitchell, Martel, Francis, Ferguson, Findley, Hay, Herriot, Highway) hover nearby, perhaps just upstairs lying on my bed or fluffing my pillows, ever ready to put their two cents in to any conversation. Even those authors I don't read often are somewhere about, a back bedroom perhaps, a closet. I can hear them back there jousting with their sabres and geeky sci-fi talk. Even they'll come bounding down the stairs sometimes with some outlandish pronouncement.
  
  But the authors who don't get to live at my house are the author of this book and his ilk (John Metcalf's another that comes to mind.) It's not that I wouldn't like to invite them in. They are after all trying to get in, scratching at my kitchen window at night, scrabbling down my chimney and peering at me through the fireplace screen while I'm trying to formulate some erudite thought. And I'm tempted to let them in if only to rid myself of the image of their...
  
  But then the jig would be up wouldn't it.
  
  
  ---to be continued---
  
• 
  Clark Knowles

  Excellent book, especially the first four essays. The remainder of the book concerns specific stories or authors, a little tough for me because I hadn't read any of them. I might return to those essays if I read those selections. The craft essays are excellent, but also seem to be for writers who are already working/thinking of themselves as writers. Or at least wanting to write. I think I'd struggle bringing much of this to my Intermediate Fiction courses where I don't feel I teach writing so much as willingness to apply+trust the process and immersion in the creative state. Once a writer is already engaged in the heavy lifting of draft and revision, I suspect this book would serve them well.
• 
  William Williams

  A terrific collection of essays on writing and reading. Glover outlines why and how good writing works at the atomic level - at the level of the sentence and phrase. Glover - referencing Hegel, Wittgenstein, Kant, and Canadian neuroscientist Merlin Donald - deftly handles how writing and story-telling shape our communal and individual realities. Standouts in my opinion are "The Mind of Alice Munro," "A Scrupulous Fidelity (on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser")" and "Before/After History and the Novel." Highly recommended.
• 
  Elijah

  This is a handy little collection of essays, but not all of them are focused on writing. The second half of the book takes a turn toward the overly philosophic and tends to focus on specific works of literature. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but the first five essays were probably the most relevant to writer's craft and to my own understanding of fiction.
• 
  Geoff Wyss

  A pretty thorough disappointment. Got drawn into this one by his chapter on Thomas Bernhard, which had a few nice observations, but there wasn't much else in the book that I could recommend. Should have known I was in trouble when the first two chapters were called "How To Write a Novel" and "How To Write a Short Story"--and those chapter titles aren't ironic.
• 
  Brian

  That's the trouble with a compilation of essays previously published. When you compile them, they are blatantly repetitive.
  
  The first half of the book is fine. Then you land in a bit too much MFA land for me and I get lost in the "art."
  
  The advantage of being away from great piles of books is, you're forced to read what you have at hand. So I finished the book versus stalling out near the end.
• 
  Susan

  Really interesting, esp the first few chapters. Helped me think about writing in a new way.
  
• 
  Isaac Hooke

  Didn't get to finish this since I had it out from the library, but definitely loved the chapters dedicated to writing.
• 
  Karen

  I read this as one would read a textbook. Useful. Sometimes surprising. At times grim. This book made me think about how I write but much more about how I read. I will reread.
• 
  Brenda

  Excellent little book full of thought-provoking material as well as practical advice on structure, analysis and characterization. Loved this book. Will be one I return to often.
• 
  Sarah

  Have to read this one again. Thick in content but mostly accessible.