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Title: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Author: Anne Lamott
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 5/5
Why I Read It: I read this book a few years ago, and I thought it would make a good re-read.

Summary: A writer reflects on the writing life. Hint: It must include writing.

Review: If you are a writer—published or not—and you haven’t read this book, get thee to a bookery forthwith! Or, to put it another way: go get this book and read it NOW.

It’ll crack you up, it’ll be the flint that sparks your next great burst of inspiration, it’ll warm the cockles of your poor heart made bitter by all the self-doubt and the rejection and the hard work.

I almost had a breakdown trying to choose a quote to post with this review. Because it’s all so good. I would quote the whole book here if I could. But I had to pick one, so here you go:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

As I work on revising my most recent NaNoWriMo draft, I have to keep reminding myself of this. To really drive the message home, I think I’m going to tattoo one letter on each knuckle: B-I-R-D-B-Y-B-I-R-D.

Your Turn: What’s your favorite writing advice book?

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Writing Down the Bones
• Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: Outwitting Writer’s Block: And Other Problems of the Pen
Author: Jenna Glatzer
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I bought this book before my book buying ban went into effect, and I’m trying to make progress on the small physical TBR list that is my bookshelf. (In sharp contrast to my virtual TBR list, which is just plain overwhelming.)

Summary: Advice from a screenwriter and playwright on what to do when you find yourself staring at the dreaded blank page.

Review: This book is a good collection of practical ideas for when your writing life seems to be stuck in park. A lot of the tips you’ve probably heard before, but it’s nice to have them handy in one place.

I appreciated how the author included lots of quotes and advice from other authors on how they cope with a blank page. It’s also chock full of writing prompts, which always help to get your fingers out of the no-fly zone. For example:

Write about a secret you accidentally didn’t keep.

The humor was a little on the goofy side, which I didn’t exactly love. Sometimes it felt like the lines were delivered with a wink and a nudge. Still, a few lines got a chuckle out of me.

I’ll leave you with one of the tips I liked. It’s from the section about how to carve out writing time when you have a family who can’t seem to live without you for more than 5 minutes at a time:

If you have an office in your home, find something to hang from the doorknob, such as a red scrunchie or a do-not-disturb doorknob hanger, to signify that you are inside and working.

Your Turn: What do you do when you can’t seem to get the words out of your head and onto the page?

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days—My rating: 3.5/5
• Writing Down the Bones
• On Writing Well
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: Revision & Self-Editing: Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Finished Novel
Author: James Scott Bell
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 5/5
Why I Read It: I was looking for a practical guide to editing my first draft.

Summary: A national bestselling author and writing teacher lays out a plan for revising your novel’s first draft.

Review: I wish I could roll up all the tips in this book into some Silly Putty and stick it directly on my brain.

So far, I’ve flipped through about 20 different revision books. Most of those books were too abstract in their advice, and some others (while excellent) were focused on line editing. I needed a book to guide me on the macro edit—pacing, character development, setting, voice, and so on.

This book has all that and more. Including a revision checklist at the back. I am a checklist sort of a girl. (Sometimes in the morning, while I’m in bed waiting for my daughter to wake up next to me, I’ll start composing my checklist for the day in my head and then obsessively repeat the items over and over so I don’t forget them before I get to paper & pen.)

The advice in this book is practical, with writing exercises that aren’t just busy work. It’s clear they’ll get you further along on your revision goals.

As the author suggests, I’m going to expand the checklist to include all the other nuggets throughout the book I want to be sure to check for. But I’m out of the school mindset, so I’ve otherwise drawn a blank on how best to absorb all this wonderful knowledge.

Here’s one tip I plan to use soon:

Then, after some cooling off, produce a summary of the novel. A synopsis, but one’s that subject to change. Because you’re going to try to make it better and deeper. You may even change it significantly.

The summary should be no more than 2,000 to 3,000 words, and you should produce several versions. …If you produce several of these summaries, and finally fine-tune the best version, the method will give you a roadmap for an organic second draft.

You can bet I’m going to read the rest of the Write Great Fiction series.

Your Turn: What tricks do you use to learn and internalize new things from a book you’re reading?

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Description & Setting
• Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
• Plot & Structure
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Title: The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
Author: Susan Bell
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I found this book while browsing the writing section of the library.

Summary: An editor offers advice on how to edit your own writing.

Review: I loved the first half of this book for its practicality, but as it got less practical I lost interest. Example:

• Loved learning about how The Great Gatsby changed during the editing process
• Didn’t love reading about the entire history of book editing

One little gem was the author’s tips for gaining perspective on your work—techniques like editing in a different environment than where you wrote, changing the font when you read it back, hanging it up on a laundry line to look for big picture issues.

Even though I didn’t love the second half, the book was easy to get through, which isn’t always true of writing books. (As my shelf of 20+ unread writing books can attest.)

I’ll leave you with one of the practical tips that stuck with me:

Take care not to indiscriminately repeat a turn of phrase. Avoid, that is, overusing one particular sentence structure, such as, for example, a clause, then a colon, then a list. Single out the structure you unwittingly repeat, enter it in a notebook marked “patterns to break,” and make it the only thing you look for on one or two read-throughs. Hunt down your habit, and train your mind to flinch at it.

Have you ever tried looking for just one thing during a read-through?

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Title: The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
Author: Noah Lukeman
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I read a similar book in January and loved it, and Amazon said I might like this one too.

Summary: A literary agent and former editor shares tips on how to make your first 5 pages shine.

Review: I would recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers over this book. However, if you’re looking for another slightly different list of issues to look for in your writing, go ahead and read this book.

The advice in this one was solid, but other elements of it weren’t:

• Silly, obvious examples—Showing examples of what you’re talking about: Awesome. Showing examples that were obviously constructed just for the purpose of this book and were so ridiculous that only a complete idiot could have written them: Not so awesome. The examples didn’t really help me at all.
• Exercises for the sake of exercises—A few times, the writing exercises at the end of each chapter seemed arbitrary, like someone just thought them up and stuck them in the book without stopping to test whether they were actually helpful. I’d rather have a couple tried-and-true exercises than a bucket of this-seems-like-it-might-work exercises.

This book took me a couple months to read, whereas I devoured Self-Editing for Fiction Writers in about a week.

Do you typically take a while to get through a writing how-to book? Or does it depend on how good it is?

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