by munchman
…Expressed a tad more eloquently cuz its contributors include some of the best writers in the writing biz.
Accurately subtitled “A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft & Career,” this book, published in 2008 (okay, so I’m a little late to the party; at least I got there!) has very good advice indeed from writers including Lisa Firke, Shannon Hale Tess Gerritsen, Ira Glass, Tom Sant, Barbara O’Conner, Tim Patterson, Leo Babauta, and many more prose specialists and includes sections on creativity and motivation, the craft of writing, business savvy, and just plain literary thoughts. (I ignored the literary thoughts thing, but that’s, you know, how the munchman, um, munches.)
One of my favorite chapters is called “Great Faith. Great Doubt. Great Effort.” In it, writer Rhonda Abrams gets right to the heart of things:
It is not only the quality of your ideas, but the strength of your faith in your ideas that will help you succeed….Great doubt is part of the process of building a success, not ncessarily an indication of failure….Nothing succeeds without hard work….
Yeah, we all get kind of exhausted by the hard work, i.e., Great Faith thing, but isn’t that what life in general is all about anyway? My father used to say that “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.” My current take on that, though, changes a couple of work: “Anything worth doing is hard.”
The New Writer’s Handbook makes it a little easier to take the hard road.
munchalito recommends both.
More about this book HERE.