Author: Marcie

The last of the pieces in Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books 2000-2016 and one of the longer ones, “The Hope of Rabbits” is a record of the time Ursula K. Le Guin spent at Hedgebrook, on the coast of Whidbey Island north of Seattle.

She was invited there for a month, more than twenty years ago, and she agreed to stay for a single week.

“Seven days with no obligations, no routine, no society except at dinner time – but not exactly vacation days, not holiday: workdays for the real work, without any distractions except those I invent.”

Much of the week’s writing is filled with her observations about her surroundings, in particular – as one would guess from the title – the many rabbits that live there, watching the writers come and go.

Her writer’s eye also captures other situational details that invite the reader into her space there, like the type of wood from which a door is made or the sort of work done in the garden on the Saturday.

Living arrangements there are integrally connected to the natural world, which seems largely peaceful and contemplative.

Although there is room for some self-deprecating humour too.
“I suddenly realized that I can get rid of the flies in my windowseat windows, which come in the door and buzz and distract me, by opening the windows. The flies fly out. Ma che stupidezza!”

(This is just the kind of “discovery” that I can imagine myself making, caught in the flurry of a draft, irritated by some detail, for which there is a simple solution that only later becomes clear to me in an embarrassingly obvious way.)

There is some consideration about the fact that only women writers visit Hedgebrook (and the introduction to the piece debates the merits of and need for such a space, in this patriarchal society) and about how a male writer who might have stayed in her particular cabin might have responded to the space therein.

She explains the process of decision-making which governed her packing, which books she chose to bring with her and which she left behind. And almost immediately she notices differences in her work habits which appeal to her.

“I think about the humane pace of longhand, and how one is constantly looking away from the notebook a things around it, near or far, changing position as one sits, doodling in the margin while working out a transition, half-consciously noticing the slant of the sunlight, the advance of shadows, the color of the sky, fully absorbed in the work, and yet open to the surrounding world, as we are not when working at a computer screen.”

The emphasis, overall, in on her interior experience of the week, with only brief mentions of social interactions (which made her anxious in advance but which were, ultimately, positive experiences).

“I am nearing the end of my story, which may be accommodating itself to my time here – I suspect it of doing so. But it’s 41 pages now and should not go on forever, surely? It leaps about strangely, as it is, I think I know what it’s about and then I am not certain.”

The emphasis is always on the work and she is not afraid to question and explore, not afraid to say that she still questions and explores even as an accomplished and decorated writer. (I’ve written about Le Guin’s about writing about writing here and here, as well.)

Good stuff for writers.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Hope of Rabbits: The Journal of a Writer’s Work” in Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books 2010-2016 (Small Beer Press, 2016)

One of the reasons that I enjoyed reading this volume so much, even though its structure is more “how-to” than “cover to cover”, is that it begins with a discussion of subjectivity. (This is the very element I craved in Sell Your Story In a Single Sentence by Lane Shefter Bishop.)

The work opens with a bird’s eye view of a conference scene in which various industry professionals (publishers and agents, primarily) are citing their requirements for proposals. One after another, they contradict each other blatantly.

What thrills one person is the very element which bores the next person. And although this has likely always been the case, with so many additional technological possibilities now existing, the ways in which one can be either – thrilled or bored – are even more numerous.

Acknowledging the diversity in requirements, the first order of business for Rein and Larsen (who have been wrestling with this dilemma for some time – this is the fifth edition of the work) is to explain how they established the general principles they present.

This is particularly important as How to Write a Book Proposal is designed for the broadest possible audience: cookbook authors and memoirists can look here for advice.

Despite the vast audience to which this volume should appeal, I am not an ideal reader. The volume caters to non-fiction writers, as it is unusual to write a proposal for a fiction.

Nonetheless, there is useful information here for fiction writers too. The discussion of assembling specific elements is readily transferable: assembling a biography, creating a virtual media kit, gathering book stats and outlining a marketing strategy which would support and augment a publisher’s efforts.

Advice offered is both general and specific. When it comes to formatting, for instance, the best formatting is invisible (it shifts all focus to the material) but one should also avoid asterisks and footnotes (anything with the potential to disrupt a reader’s engagement with the proposal).

One of the most interesting discussions is the way in which the basic structure of a proposal can be altered to reflect the individual project.

A pop psychology book’s proposal, for instance, could include these elements as follows: Pizzazz, Overview, Book Specs, Author Bio, Author Platform, Audience, Comps, Book’s TOC, Detailed Outline, Sample Writing, Supplemental Material.

Whereas a narrative-driven memoir could include these elements as follows: Pizzazz, Titlepage, Proposal Contents, Overview, Book Specs, Author Bio, Book’s TOC, Divider Page, Detailed Outline including Sample Writing.

Each element is considered in detail (Pizazz, Overview, etc.) before any discussion of how one might combine them; it’s fascinating to consider the benefits of ordering and expanding them differently, depending upon the nature of the proposal.

Although the elements required for the rare beast that is the Novel Proposal are limited (Author Bio, Platform, Personal Promotion and Supplemental Material), the general principles guiding the preparation of the other elements are useful for refocusing the writer’s attention to detail (for instance, any writer can keep in mind promotional elements and platform-related suggestions to help grow an audience).

The material is up-to-date and relevant for western writers, listing, for instance, the Big 5 publishers, and reminding writers of technical pitfalls which exist between well-known digital platforms and services, for instance, the risks of not previewing your email in various programs (i.e. how easily the formatting gets screwed up even when you’ve perfected it in the program you are using).

Jody Rein and Michael Larsen have assembled and updated a useful – some might even say indispensable – guide in How to Write a Book Proposal (Writer’s Digest, 2017).

Good stuff for (mainly non-fiction) writers.

Rein, Jody and Michael Larsen. How to Write a Book Proposal (5th edition Writer’s Digest Books, 2017 )

If you’re not prepared to invest as much time with your revisions as you have invested with your draft to date, this is probably not the book for you.

“The thing is, you’ve put in a lot of time developing your story into a workable draft, so this isn’t the time to hurry. Be open to discovery, chagrin, exuberance, fatigue. Be willing to take the time to think.”

If you’re looking for an exhaustive primer on revision and polishing, part-commentary and part-workbook, The Last Draft will fit the bill.

“Write fifty scenarios if you need to. Draw cartoons. (Seriously.) Write another draft. I can think of a lot of writers who took five, six, or more years to get their books written – and published.”

The introduction and the conclusion are filled with all the kinds of things one comes to expect in books about writing.

Some inspirational: “Write what you love; love writing it; hope for a readership; appreciate every reader.”

Some practical: “Line to line. Paragraph to paragraph. Page to page. All the way to the end.”

In between, however, is a wealth of detailed and considered advice for writers who seek not to simply complete a finished draft but hone their skill.

Throughout the book are exercises which could be completed as discovered but the commentary is extensive so the exercises are accompaniment rather than disruptions (I read straight through and then returned to select exercises for areas in the draft which I had already identified as needing extra attention).

Important concepts are explained clearly and immediately. For instance, the distinction between exposition and interiority.

  “Exposition should be interesting in its own right, even as it amplifies prior or later action. It is always clarifying, never obfuscating. Its appearance should never so interrupt action that dramatic engagement is lost.
  Interiority should deepen the engagement of reader with character. Its purpose is not primarily expository; it should not be necessary to the action, though it is usually triggered by action. It is enriching and emotional. When it explores a character’s emotional conflict, it adds to dramatic tension. And it brings the reader into deep empathy.”

There is a pleasing balance between commentary and examples, which showcase recent literary novels and stories (with the occasional example from the later decades of the 20^th century), usually via summary rather than quotations.

Some craft concepts are familiar, included in books which are aimed at beginning writers, but The Last Draft nudges things a little further, inviting deeper contemplation.

For instance, a discussion of the struggle a protagonist faces  is common in books about the writer’s craft, but sometimes in superficial terms (which may be appropriate in an introductory volume); here, the matter of struggle is afforded a less tangible dimension.

“There should be two levels of struggle:
1. The need for something concrete that the protagonist is fighting to get (such as safe haven, a scholarship at ballet school, or the love of a partner),
2. The urgent desire to be better.”

Similarly, Scofield presses beyond the usual talk of summary and description in “What is the story?” by including this element in a list of items to consider: “State the vision or intention of your novel.”

Certainly one could complete the process of revision without considering this question, but an understanding of the answer would inform all the other elements of revision as well.

“So one way to think of vision in the novel is to ask yourself:
How should people treat one another?
How should the earth’s goods be shared?
What responsibilities do families (or strangers) have for one another?
What happens when such ‘goodnesses’ are violated?
What do you think an individual is capable of under great stress?
One way or another, you are inevitably making a case for how life works, so you might as well be conscious of what you are doing.”

Text-boxes summarize the key points Scofield will explore, and this framework makes it possible to use these lists to direct your attention to specific elements after a read-through.

For instance, the list under “How do I revise?” includes “5. Develop a scheme of lines of threads”, and several pages later that is considered in detail. (I was calling this element of my draft ‘patterning’, and Scofield’s series of statements offered another perspective on the element’s development and importance.)

“Lines of Threads
5. Develop a scheme of lines of threads.
What are ‘threads’?
They are lines of action and meaning that run through the story.
But didn’t we just do that with plot and subplots?
Well, yes, but there are other ways to think of them.
What questions are raised that the story answers?
What motifs throughout the manuscript enrich meaning?
What are the major emotional issues in the story interiority?
What elements of backstory illuminate the story?
How does setting strengthen story?”

Granular and methodical, inquisitive and exuberant, Sandra Scofield’s The Last Draft is a valuable resource. (It also contains a useful list of other books on craft, most of which were new-to-me, even though I have nearly 600 books on the subject on my shelves.)

Terrific stuff for experienced writers.

Scofield, Sandra. The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision (Penguin Random House, 2017)

Wandering through the 800s in the library, I spotted this book when I was feeling frustrated with my efforts to summarize a book-length project. So many hours spent on just a few sentences. So many ways to tell it slant. So few words at the end of a writing session. 

Lane Shefter Bishop’s book seemed the perfect match. As the CEO of Vast Entertainment, which specializes in screen adaptations from longer narratives, she has many years of experience hearing and shaping the elevator pitch.

Between 2011 and 2016, 45% of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture were based on books: someone came up with an enticing pitch for each of these projects and Bishop points to the primary importance of a logline in that process.

A logline is a powerfully crafted single sentence that highlights the most unique element(s) of your work. In short, it shows others why they should want what you have.

In some ways, she spends more time discussing what the logline is not than what the logline is. It’s not the recitation of “one film title MEETS other film title”, which is open to misinterpretation. It’s not the back cover blurb, which is more generic. It’s not the movie-poster copy, which belongs in marketing team meetings. And it’s not a rehashing of the entire plot.

But the bulk of the book is comprised of examples of loglines, (and, later, exercises) accompanied by advice and suggestions for constructing them effectively.

Given her background, it’s appropriate that Bishop turns to the screen and stage (predominantly screen) for her examples. When it comes to “Wicked”, for instance, she is evaluating the musical stage production, not Gregory Maguire’s novel, which was the inspiration for it.

For prose writers, like me, who are all about books, this does introduce an element of distance, and overlooks the really interesting detail of how the logline for the novel Wicked might have differed from the logline for the stage production “Wicked”; nonetheless, the idea of crafting summary sentences is a skill required by a variety of professionals, so this did not put me off the work.

She nearly always includes a “Rough” logline which she then corrects (visibly, with strike-outs) into a “Redo”, and increasingly as the book progresses, she ends with a “Clean” version. (It’s puzzling why she doesn’t offer final versions of all of them. Why, for instance, not offer a clean version of “Pretty Woman”, when most readers would be familiar with the film and might find the development progress interesting.)

She focusses on three anchors in a logline:

Who is the protagonist?

What do they want?

What is at stake?

Each of these anchors receives some detailed consideration and Bishop does offer a rule-set. The challenge, however, is that ultimately it is a matter of taste and contradictions abound because human beings are contradictory creatures: we like what we like and that doesn’t follow a rule-set.  

So Bishop’s rule-set is ever-shifting. In one instance, a logline is rewritten to include new details, because “you can never go wrong by being more specific”. In another instance, a logline is rewritten to remove unnecessary details: “Notice by the way, that I removed all reference to the high school. That’s because it doesn’t matter where he delivers his speech.” So, apparently, you can go wrong by being more specific.

Bishop does not call out the subjectivity, however. She relies upon her years of experience to back her conviction about what makes a good logline and suggests that it is a matter of standards.

Perhaps this is wise on her part, because “selling is a way of life” and, as she observes, the world truly revolves around marketing. So, Bishop is selling herself as an expert, and she does so consistently.

For an experienced writer, however, the matter of subjectivity is key, and it’s disappointing to feel that it’s being shuttled into a corner, covered with a sheet like a piece of furniture in a cottage off-season.

Ultimately, there is no unique piece of advice here. Perhaps it was unfair to expect there would be, but the fact that an entire book exists on the matter of writing single-sentence pitches does suggest a particular expertise.

Actually, the unique piece of advice could exist for the writer pitching specifically to Lane Shefter Bishop. But my takeaway is that I simply must do all the things an experienced writer is already doing daily – tweak vocabulary, choose dynamic words, aim to be both accurate and succinct – but, this time, with a single sentence.

Good stuff for beginning writers.

Bishop, Lane Shefter. Selling Your Story in a Single Sentence: Advice from the Frontlines of Hollywood (The Countryman Press – W. W. Norton, 2016)

Whereas Ann Patchett’s essay was written for people who are specifically interested in writing – either in her own process of writing or the ways in which her process might serve as a model for their own – Maxine Clair’s 2014 book is written for people who are interested in exploring their own creativity.

Whether because they have never had a creative outlet or because their creative aspirations have taken a back seat to other aspects of life (whether more or less satisfying): Imagine This is about taking the opportunity to imagine alternatives.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph. For instance, Mary Oliver heralds chapter nine:

“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

The epigraphs are designed to act as a way of probing your thoughts on how you engage with the world around you, which suits a book preoccupied with the inner life.

The narrative is partly rooted in the author’s personal experience and partly in a broader commentary related to the aspect of her life under discussion. Her autobiographical writing is unsentimental and matter-of-fact, avoiding the nitty-gritty and concentrating on the patterns she has observed as she gradually moved towards fulfillment. The commentary takes a step back from her personal life and invites readers to situate their own experience in this broader perspective.

Finally, each chapter ends with a series of exercises, prompts and queries designed to encourage readers to explore. At the end, there is a short interview and a list of sources (which one could approach as a reading list, although an actual list would have been helpful).

Much of the material here is familiar, but the tone strikes a satisfying balance between informal and informative. Imagine This is also delightfully jargon-free. One does not have the sense that she is simply looking to capitalize on the insecurities and disappointments which can drive the despairing towards the shelves of self-help and personal growth.

“It can be tempting to linger in maybe-land, savoring the satisfaction of having made a choice, but shying away from commitment. The business of consciously committing your mind, body, and spirit to a new creative expression requires stepping up your energy over time to both develop and sustain new habits.”

Although the book is clearly written with a varied audience in mind, I found the growth of her creative work as a writer (through a helpful exchange with Toni Morrison, a confrontation with a discouraging and critical English professor, and her early experiences with publication) of particular interest and the joy with which she practices her craft is inspiring.

Good stuff for writers.

Clair, Maxine. Imagine This: Creating the Work You Love (Agate Bolden, 2014)

This I began to read while walking home from the library. The construction on Eglinton creates pedestrian detours which take me off the straightaway, force me to slow my pace even more, travel alleyways rather than sidewalks.

Peter Turchi’s book feels like exactly the right writing book for me right now, as I fuss with the details in a complicated structure in a manuscipt I’ve been fussing with for countless revisions, constructing detours around the page to play with discovery and mystery.

It reassures me to learn that Jennifer Egan rewrote parts of A Visit from the Goon Squad 79 or 80 times. (Although now I wonder if I should be counting drafts, wonder what made her decide to count. Or whether it was an application’s relentless habit instead, electronic memory.)

This I learned from a NYT interview, but it fits, because Egan’s novel proves Turchi’s point, that some novelists are puzzle makers.  Actually, ALL writers, he suggests.

“Our wariness of neat solutions, our desire to grapple with deeper mysteries, is what draws us to serious fiction,” he writes.

A Muse and A Maze is a delight. Not only does it actually include puzzles (of all sorts: even the cover!) but puzzles which are designed to appeal specifically to bookish people.

There are solutions in the back, except for one puzzle which was presented as a contest for readers to solve, with directions to the author’s website instead. A logic puzzle about writers, an acrostic with bookish clues, Will Shortz’s favourite word game, magic squares, riddles: they are designed to intrigue.

It also contains many inspiring quotes which support his theory of writers-as-puzzle-makers and many suggestions for your TBR list. It’s fitting that he recommends so many books: “Even the books we don’t choose to spend time with tell us something about what we value.”

Also included are many carefully selected images, from self-portraits of artists which contain only objects to photographs and prints which complement the text. He even includes a set of tangram pictures and a template on the back page so you can make your own and play at assembling the pieces into the shapes shown.

There are longer musings upon concepts which underpin his theory (the bits on mystery and labyrinths were especially interesting to me) with an abundance of illustrations and references. Even if these weren’t elements of interest to you before-hand, Turchi makes them seem fascinating.

The quotes included from other writers’ musings upon the craft of writing vary from general thoughts on construction to quotes which more directly reflect his theory.

John Le Carre writes: “Creating order from chaos is the innermost room of a writer’s desire.” Ross MacDonald writes: “We reshape ourselves as we write.” These ideas carry a broad appeal; surely any writer can find something to relate to here.

Tim O’Brien writes: “A satisfying plot, I believe, involves not a diminution of mystery but rather a fundamental enlargement.” And Jan Kjaerstad writes: “You know…all of this could be rearranged to form quite a different story.” These ideas may have a more specific appeal, seeming to speak of a particular kind of story and particular ideas about how it might be told.

Further into the work, thoughts by other writers are more complex, even more specific in terms of what motivates their storytelling and how structure and theme dance in some literary fiction.

James Salter writes: “Most of the details…have long since been transformed to rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important…. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.”

Michael Ondaatje writes: “It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion…. We live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in kaleidoscope reappear in new forms…. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”

I’m not sure that all writers are puzzle makers. But I can think of specific books which read like puzzles to me and they are usually amongst my favourites. While not every writer will be drawn to Peter Turchi’s meditation, those who find the idea of it immediately intriguing will likely find the book thrilling.

Great stuff for puzzle-making writers.

Turchi, Peter A Muse & A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery and Magic (Trinity U Press, 2014)

A writing book that begins with an epigraph from John Gardner? That bodes well for me. Gardner’s was one of the first books I read on craft and it has stood up well to rereading.

Vivid & Continuous contains 15 chapters, beginning with one on Writing and ending with one on Humility.

It contains some very broad advice. Such as: “no writer can please everyone”. And a general reminder that writers need to be very good manipulators. (Of text, yes, but also their own doubts and fears.) 

He offers specific advice too. For instance, he considers the twenty most common craft-related issues that lessen immediacy for a reader. The first is Dialogue Tags that Yell for Attention; the last is Searching for Substitute Words instead of using Commonplace ones (and, in between, Backstory and Simile-metaphor Overload). 

John McNally has read over a million pages of fiction written by beginning writers, and he has edited theme-based anthologies. He is well situated to identify the common default stories – those ubiquitous and problematic tales – even when they vary regionally (for instance, the plethora of snowboarding stories written in Colorado). 

He can warn against the overused and make suggestions to transcend. Which is what he does when it comes to specific structural and mechanical issues as well, as in the chapter on  Imitative Fallacy. Here he begins with a definition and ends with examples of how Flowers for Algernon mitigates the common problems associated with Imitative Fallacy and also explains Keyes’ techniques.

McNally relies upon familiar stories and full-length works to demonstrate a variety of techniques and approaches. In fact, there are ten pages filled with tiny print at the end of the volume, devoted to  Further Reading.

This includes his Works Cited but also an extended reference list, which includes biographies and collections of letters, story collections and novels. Although there are not many representatives of either young writers or genre writers, otherwise the list is representative of a wide variety of literary prose.; he recommends writers from Bradbury to Gaitskill, from Gowdy to Hurston. 

At the end of each chapter are a few exercises, which are designed to work well for both individuals and groups. (It’s frustrating when exercises are designed only for a classroom setting: surely the majority of readers are alone in a room with a piece of paper.) These are general enough to be inspiring but specific enough to feel fresh and repeatable.

Very good stuff for writers.

Selected Quotes:

“There is, when all is said and done, only that which works for you.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about humility recently because, as a creative writing professor, I see less and less of it every year, and it depresses me.”

“Routine, routine, routine: a writer finds a routine that works and, barring life’s interferences, sticks with it.”

McNally, John. Vivid & Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction (U of Iowa, 2013)

In a letter to Marian Engel, Hugh MacLennan wrote: ““But factually I’m fifty, even though my economic status is no more secure than than of the average McGill engineering graduate. But time, the ability at last to become accustomed to it, to measure its power and effects – there’s no doubt of it, a novelist needs that. A woman novelist, oddly, needs it much less than a man. That is because a woman of 20, if she’s intelligent, is basically more mature than an intelligent man of 30.”

It was 1957. Thirty years later, he is eighty years old and delivering the first of the Margaret Laurence lectures.

“It seems a grim jest of God that she should be gone and I should be here, for I was born some eighteen years before she came into the world.”

Because I am less familiar with his works and more familiar with Laurence’s, I enjoyed the first part of the piece more. (And it was particularly fine to discover a reference to the importance of both Laurence and Gabrielle Roy to the Manitoba letters scene, as I have been systematically reading through Roy’s works over the past year.)

His piece is preoccupied with time, as suits an octogenarian speaker, and it is interesting to read his perspective on the relationships between nations.

“Sometimes people ask, ‘What is the difference between Canada and the United States apart from the climates?’ Historically and psychologically there are very great differences. Until the long debacle in Vietnam, the Americans had never lost a war against a foreign power. But the ancestors of nearly all Canadians were losers.”

His experience being a writer stretched from Princeton to Oxford, from Halifax to Germany; he literally ran into Einstein walking on campus and compares the prices of orange juice and hot dogs across the decades. As one would expect, even only having read Two Solitudes, there is much to consider about national identities and conflicts large and small.

MacLennan has nothing to say about his writing process or whether he liked to read in the mornings or in the evenings. He looked outward as much as he looked inward.

Ulitmately, however, the piece left me wanting to read his last novel, to which he refers as having taken him six years to write, Voices in Time. And his discussion of the introduction of a Metis writer, to the pages of Margaret Laurence’s fiction, made me want to reread The Diviners.

Next in the series? Mavis Gallant. Won’t that be a treat.

Still Writing falls somewhere between Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open and Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. It contains some concrete advice and some general musings, some straight talk and some philosophizing.

Her tone is conversational and at times the narrative feels very personal. She says, for instance: “If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.” Perhaps that isn’t true for every writer but it speaks to me.

Not every line has an immediate or intense resonance for me, however. I feel less of a connection to this description of the process: “The page turns from us like a wounded lover. We will have to win it over, coax it out of hiding. Promise to do better next time. Apologize for our disregard. And then, we settle into the pattern that we know.”

But Dani Shapiro combines a personal response with more commonplace observations of the writing life.

“So what is it about writing that makes it – for some of us – as necessary as breathing? It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away.”

Sometimes she offers straightforward advice:

“Act as if you are a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.”

She is well aware of the standard pitfalls and challenges and issues direct warnings:

“We are commuting inward. And on Monday mornings – or after a long holiday, a summer vacation, any time we have been away from the page – we have to be even more vigilant about that commute. We are traveling to that place inside ourselves – so small as to be invisible – where we are free to roam and play.”

At times, her language is strikingly simple: “Word after word, sentence after sentence, we build our writing lives.”

Is this really a helpful statement? Perhaps not for every writer. But as someone who has spent more time resisting the simple act of writing a sentence, I find simple directives useful.

“Who would ever be in the mood to write?” she asks. And, then, she sends you to your desk.

Good stuff for writers!

Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013

[Note I added this to my reading list thanks to Alexis Kienlen, whose comment on GoodReads convinced me that I should give it a try.]