Writers, Read This!
I've been pretty busy lately with work on my next book (which is at the proof read stage, yay!), but I wanted to take a moment to share a great new title that all writers should read.
There are a lot of books out there that tell you how to write and where to submit your work for publication. There are not a lot of books that give writers insights into how to make sense of the writing life. Work Book by Steven Heighton should be on the shelf of all writers hoping to survive the strange process of letting their work out into the world.
I loved this book for a number of reasons:
1. It is like a meditation book especially for those who write. Awesome.
2. It helped to put things in perspective, i.e. how to open yourself up to the process of creativity and at the same time being able to handle people actually reading your work.
3. It is unlike any other book on writing that I have ever read.
Here are some sample quotes from the book to show you what I mean...
On the lost art of boredom:
"We have to remember how to invite and receive the words and insights we can't force to mind. We have to relearn how to muse, drowse and stare into blankness, adrift, dormant, even bored, especially now when our various screens are always present—firewalls between us and the reality of dreams."
On criticism:
"To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers."
"Aggrieved writer-critics suffer from an understandable illusion: that if they can identify real flaws in the work of another writer, they must be inherently better, smarter, either in what they've written already or in what they will surely write someday."
"There are few critics whose harshest opinions would be tempered, or even reversed, in the wake of their own large-scale success."
"The writing life's cruelest irony: the creation of good fiction and poetry requires a life lived with existentially open pores, while handling the public side of a career requires thick skin, a closed carapace." (*love this one!)
On the writing life:
"The writing life, like life in general, has a sacramental and a secretarial side. As years pass and debts and duties accrue, the secretarial, clerical mode spreads like a lymphoma and starts to squeeze life from the sacramental, creative side."
"Cast a spell and small flaws don't matter."
"Every moment spent in full attention is a moment spent in eternity."
