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Start with a Word: On the Craft and Adventure of Writing
A creative masterclass for aspiring and established writers alike
After decades of writing award-winning books on subjects ranging from poetry to art to liturgical seasons, celebrated author Marilyn McEntyre turns her attention to the vocation that has shaped her life. Start with a On the Craft and Adventure of Writing is a literary masterclass that eschews drills and formulas in favor of close readings and refreshingly playful advice.
A veteran teacher, Marilyn understands that the best writing instruction doesn't come from rigid rules or rote approaches to filling the blank page. Instead, she demonstrates how the writers whose works we have enjoyed can become our tutors. She calls us to move beyond asking "What does this text say?" to a more revealing "How does this text work?" This shift in perspective—from passive consumption to active apprenticeship—transforms how we encounter literature and how we create it.
More than a how-to manual, Start with a Word is an invitation into a way of being that honors both the precision and the mystery of words. It offers short lessons on essential elements of literary craft, close readings of passages from a range of works, writing prompts, and, above all, encouragement for authors to find their unique path into work only they can create.
"Reading and writing keep alive in us the desire to be precise, lively, surprising, generous, inviting, challenging, wise. They make us want to be good, if only in the sense that choosing exact and appropriate words is a matter of choosing the good. . . . I don't think you can be an excellent writer without developing some virtues, if only fidelity to a practice that honors the gift of language."
After decades of writing award-winning books on subjects ranging from poetry to art to liturgical seasons, celebrated author Marilyn McEntyre turns her attention to the vocation that has shaped her life. Start with a On the Craft and Adventure of Writing is a literary masterclass that eschews drills and formulas in favor of close readings and refreshingly playful advice.
A veteran teacher, Marilyn understands that the best writing instruction doesn't come from rigid rules or rote approaches to filling the blank page. Instead, she demonstrates how the writers whose works we have enjoyed can become our tutors. She calls us to move beyond asking "What does this text say?" to a more revealing "How does this text work?" This shift in perspective—from passive consumption to active apprenticeship—transforms how we encounter literature and how we create it.
More than a how-to manual, Start with a Word is an invitation into a way of being that honors both the precision and the mystery of words. It offers short lessons on essential elements of literary craft, close readings of passages from a range of works, writing prompts, and, above all, encouragement for authors to find their unique path into work only they can create.
"Reading and writing keep alive in us the desire to be precise, lively, surprising, generous, inviting, challenging, wise. They make us want to be good, if only in the sense that choosing exact and appropriate words is a matter of choosing the good. . . . I don't think you can be an excellent writer without developing some virtues, if only fidelity to a practice that honors the gift of language."
- GenresWriting
212 pages, Paperback
Published February 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 19, 2026
My review of Start with a Word appeared in the Reformed Journal on July 15, 2026:
Most books about writing offer rules. Marilyn McEntyre offers something rarer and, I’d argue, more useful: a way of reading. The central move of her new book, Start with a Word, is deceptively simple. She asks us to stop asking what a text says and to start asking how it works. The difference sounds small, but it changes everything. The first question makes us consumers of literature; the second makes us apprentices to it.
Readers of the Reformed Journal will know McEntyre’s name, and many will know her books. Her relationship with Eerdmans now spans nearly two decades and includes Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies — a book I still press into people’s hands — along with What’s in a Phrase?, Word by Word, and Make a List. Across all of them runs a single conviction: that language is a gift held in trust, easily depleted, worth tending. Those earlier books were about the stewardship of words. This one, fittingly, is about the making of them. In many ways it reads like a culmination.
It also reads like a classroom, and I mean that in the best sense. McEntyre has spent her career teaching — in colleges, seminaries, even medical schools — and she now teaches writing at Western Theological Seminary, where she has been a guiding presence in the “Art of Sacred Writing” Doctor of Ministry program. Anyone who has worked with her, in a classroom or over a manuscript, will recognize the voice in these pages: patient, precise, endlessly encouraging. She does not hand down verdicts. She sits beside you and points at a sentence and asks what it’s doing. The book proceeds the same way: short lessons on the elements of craft, close readings of passages she loves, prompts that invite rather than assign. There are no drills here, no formulas, and (thank God) no promises about your first bestseller.
A glance at the back cover tells you something about her reach. The blurbs run from Richard Rohr to Cornelius Plantinga — which is to say, from a Franciscan contemplative to a Reformed theologian, with Shauna Niequist and Michael Card in between. Not many writers can gather such a diverse congregation. But the breadth makes sense. McEntyre has always treated attention to words as a spiritual practice, and spiritual practices, unlike doctrinal positions, travel well across tribal lines.
Who is this book for? Writers, obviously — beginning ones and, I can testify, experienced ones too. But also preachers, teachers, journal-keepers, and anyone who suspects that reading more attentively might be a form of prayer. In a culture that spends words carelessly and in staggering volume, a book that teaches us to weigh them one at a time is quietly countercultural.
McEntyre has been making that argument, in one form or another, for nearly twenty years. Start with a Word may be her most winsome version of it yet. Start with this one.
https://reformedjournal.com/2026/07/1...
Most books about writing offer rules. Marilyn McEntyre offers something rarer and, I’d argue, more useful: a way of reading. The central move of her new book, Start with a Word, is deceptively simple. She asks us to stop asking what a text says and to start asking how it works. The difference sounds small, but it changes everything. The first question makes us consumers of literature; the second makes us apprentices to it.
Readers of the Reformed Journal will know McEntyre’s name, and many will know her books. Her relationship with Eerdmans now spans nearly two decades and includes Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies — a book I still press into people’s hands — along with What’s in a Phrase?, Word by Word, and Make a List. Across all of them runs a single conviction: that language is a gift held in trust, easily depleted, worth tending. Those earlier books were about the stewardship of words. This one, fittingly, is about the making of them. In many ways it reads like a culmination.
It also reads like a classroom, and I mean that in the best sense. McEntyre has spent her career teaching — in colleges, seminaries, even medical schools — and she now teaches writing at Western Theological Seminary, where she has been a guiding presence in the “Art of Sacred Writing” Doctor of Ministry program. Anyone who has worked with her, in a classroom or over a manuscript, will recognize the voice in these pages: patient, precise, endlessly encouraging. She does not hand down verdicts. She sits beside you and points at a sentence and asks what it’s doing. The book proceeds the same way: short lessons on the elements of craft, close readings of passages she loves, prompts that invite rather than assign. There are no drills here, no formulas, and (thank God) no promises about your first bestseller.
A glance at the back cover tells you something about her reach. The blurbs run from Richard Rohr to Cornelius Plantinga — which is to say, from a Franciscan contemplative to a Reformed theologian, with Shauna Niequist and Michael Card in between. Not many writers can gather such a diverse congregation. But the breadth makes sense. McEntyre has always treated attention to words as a spiritual practice, and spiritual practices, unlike doctrinal positions, travel well across tribal lines.
Who is this book for? Writers, obviously — beginning ones and, I can testify, experienced ones too. But also preachers, teachers, journal-keepers, and anyone who suspects that reading more attentively might be a form of prayer. In a culture that spends words carelessly and in staggering volume, a book that teaches us to weigh them one at a time is quietly countercultural.
McEntyre has been making that argument, in one form or another, for nearly twenty years. Start with a Word may be her most winsome version of it yet. Start with this one.
https://reformedjournal.com/2026/07/1...
May 30, 2026
Marilyn McEntyre provides inspiring and helpful instruction for new and aspiring writers, primarily those who want to tell stories either through fiction or memoir.
April 12, 2026
This Book was won on a Goodreads Giveaway.
This book will have a very niche audience. If you have never written anything or if English is maybe not your first language or if you’ve not a had competent English teacher, this book may be very beneficial to you. It starts at the very beginning of being able to write and full of many useful prompts to begin a story.
In my opinion it falls short with too many quotes from others. This book could have been a lot shorter and relayed the same message.
This book will have a very niche audience. If you have never written anything or if English is maybe not your first language or if you’ve not a had competent English teacher, this book may be very beneficial to you. It starts at the very beginning of being able to write and full of many useful prompts to begin a story.
In my opinion it falls short with too many quotes from others. This book could have been a lot shorter and relayed the same message.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews