"Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction" (Random House), by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

Writing about writing is riddled with pitfalls. Take that sentence, even: Should we reconsider the passive voice? Should we clarify which instance of "writing" we mean as a noun and which as a verb form, if either? And, anyway, what do we mean by pitfalls: traps or tricks? Actually, the challenge is more complicated than that. Writing is a specific and individual task: No two pieces can sound the same without one or both being diminished, and no two personalities approach the creative process in exactly the same way. Successful reporting and writing also involve so much of a special kind of pursued luck that they're usually irreparably harmed when they're dissected. Reassembled descriptions of the process often end up sounding like prescriptions. Or bragging.

Lucky readers of Tracy Kidder's and Richard Todd's conversation about their four shared decades in the writing life, "Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction," don't get pulled into those weeds until the book's very end. And, by then, Todd and Kidder have earned the right to offer a few quick tips. Besides, their final chapter, "Being Edited and Editing," opens with a description of this crucial part of the writing process that is more frank and helpful than any in recent memory. It's more than a fig leaf when Kidder, a long-form journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and many other accolades, mentions his editors' harsh assessments of his early work. Those are important to hear. And it's important to know that Kidder still suffers from disorganization, ballooning prose and melodrama. He still spreads printouts of a piece all over the floor or a table to see its parts more clearly, he still needs help shaping ideas, he must "work on keeping quiet," and he still reaches a point in each project when he wants to quit.