Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Shut Up & Write! is a guide for new writers by author and teacher Judy Bridges. It is one of the most straightforward and simple writing guides I’ve seen, which I like. As you go through it and read about the process and techniques described, you may feel she is describing the very process she use to write the book in your hands.

There are several other things to like about this book. I’ll mention a few here in no particular order except the last.

The book is broad; it covers the writing process from idea to publication. It remains a short book, though, and doesn’t get into excessive detail. I think it is enough to have a generally direction. As a beginning writer, you should be writing and making your work as good as you can; you can figure out the details you need as you go.

Bridges doesn’t elevate fiction writing over nonfiction. If someone writes histories, news articles, technical manuals or advertising copy, they are still writing. Many of the same skills and requirements apply to any type of writing.

I like Bridges’ suggestions for organizing or plotting a story. It is very simple and visual. It is also something that could work for a short piece or a long book. Good planning tools should help one write, not spend a lot of effort on planning.

Possibly the best thing about the Bridges’ advices is that she does not sugarcoat how hard it is to write a book—at least a good one. She tells her readers to put at least two years into a book. Admittedly, many of her students and the audience for this book will be aspiring or part-time writers with limited time, but writing a quality book is about more than time. This realistic expectation will help readers who hope to write a book get in the right mindset.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Bridges, Judy. Shut Up & Write! Milwaukee, WI: Redbird Studio Press, 2011.

February Featured Book

Our featured book for February is The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni.  It is not strictly a hard book, but it encourages you in a hard undertaking.

Because it is Black History Month and the month of National Engineering Week, my alternate featured book is The Big Roads by Earl Swift.

Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A. Saw

I’ve been putting some effort into learning to code in Python. One of the books I turned to is Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw.

Shaw leads one through Python coding by providing an example of code in each chapter. You can enter it in your editor and run it. He then provides a set of exercises to break, test, modify or improve the code or come up with something on your own.

Actually, this isn’t a particularly hard way to learn coding. It takes time and effort to work through all the exercises in the book, but learning anything challenging and worthwhile takes time and effort. You’ll learn a lot about Python, what works and how to approach programming computers in general as you work through the book.

I don’t know that I have a good way of elaborating on a book like this. It is a workbook. You work through it slowly, step-by-step at the keyboard of your computer.

If you’re a beginner in programming, this is a good place to start. Python is reputed to be easy to learn, but is a powerful general-purpose language the you can use to do about anything you want. The early chapters and exercises are quite easy and Shaw builds skill upon skill as you proceed. In that sense, Shaw makes it easy, you just have to put in the work.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

How to Build and Android by David F. Dufty

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Shaw, Zed A. Learn Python 3 the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2017.

Readings from Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen

Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now, is a daily devotional adapted from Joel Osteen’s breakout bestseller Your Best Life Now. The primary divisions of the book follow that of the source material. Likewise, the body of each short chapters is adapted closely from the original material. However, this book is organized differently. It is divided into 90 chapters, each one kept short in order to fit into a daily reading schedule.

At the top of each chapter is a reference to a passage of scripture. The chapters in the book are not expositions on the scripture; Osteen is plain in the introduction that that was not his intention. Osteen’s books, like his televised sermons, are topical rather than expositional. I thought that the connection between the scripture reading and the chapters were sometimes tenuous.

I’ll admit I took much longer than 90 days to finish this book (I probably first opened it shortly after it was published in 2005). That may have injured my sense of the book as a whole, but I think that the book was written with the hope that each chapter would be able to stand on its own as a sermonette of encouragement.

Encouragement is a good word for the book. It’s the theme through every part from encouragement to dream bigger to encouragement to press on in the hard times.

That leads also to what I think is the weakness of the book, and Osteen’s ouvre in general. It seems to draw from the theme and concepts of self-help as much (or more) as from the Bible. Even in the introduction, Osteen speaks in one sentence of wanting people to draw near to God and in the next of helping readers “unlock the doors of a fuller life.” These are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but that depends a lot on your concept of a fuller life.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Osteen. Obviously, I read several of his books and books by his predecessors as preachers of positivity in popular culture, Robert H. Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale. I have felt encourage by reading the books of these men, but I also leave there books feeling like something much deeper is missing.

Joel Osteen also wrote

Break Out

I Declare

You Can, You Will

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Be All You Can Be! by John C. Maxwell

Creative Living for Today by Maxwell Maltz

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

Power in Praise by Merlin R. Carothers

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller

You Can Become the Person You Want to Be by Robert H. Schuller

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Osteen, Joel. Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now. New York: Warner Faith, 2005.

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins takes the name of his book, Seduction of the Innocent, from the title of a notorious book by psychologist Frederic Wertham. The original was anti-comics propaganda that falsely linked comic book reading to juvenile delinquency. Collins’ novel is a pulpy crime story in which a stand-in for Wertham is murdered.

Fans of comics or pulp culture will find a lot to enjoy in this book. There are many ways to experience the frisson of recognition because many of the characters are based—to varying degrees—on real-life comic book artists, writers and publishers from the 1950s, when Wertham’s screed was published. Even the senate hearings headed by Estes Kefauver are featured in the course of the book.

The real Wertham was not murdered. Collins is careful not to make his stand-in too repulsive He acknowledges that Wertham did a lot of good work, even if his research tying comics to youth crime was bad.

The tone of the book is often silly, as you might expect from a tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of silver age comics publishing. It is still hardboiled, so there is plenty of sex and violence to go around.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Con by David W. Maurer

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwin Cook

Collins, Max Allan. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Hard Case Crime, 2013.

You Can Write a Column by Monica McCabe Cardoza

Cardoza, Monica McCabe. You Can Write a Column. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2000.

Cardoza offers no false hope for aspiring columnist. Writing a good column, repeatedly, is hard work. Selling a column, and making a living at it, is very hard work. You may have reasons to write a column, and work to get it in print, even if you don’t intend to make money directly from it.

You Can Write a Column is a short book of practical advice. It covers the how to of both writing and selling columns.

Though writing a good column can be difficult, if you have a lot of enthusiasm for your subject and appropriate knowledge of it, column writing could be a lot of fun. If you have a compelling perspective, a strong voice and credentials of the practical sort, you may also have the making of a successful column.

Cardoza points out that many columnists write for reasons other than making money from it. They may wish to express their opinions, build their professional reputations, see their names in the paper or make a living from parallel efforts.

Even so, selling and writing seem to never be far separated. Selling a column starts with writing the kind of column that well sell. Writing starts with and idea of the kind column you want to write refined with an understanding of the potential market for it.

Cardoza presents practical advice in all these areas. The book includes a few exercises, particularly in those chapters relating to developing the column. The exercises don’t constitute a step-by-step process to creating a successful column. Cardoza points out that if such a process existed, newspaper editors would be using it.

There is a lot in this little book for readers with realistic expectations. You won’t reduce your work by reading book. However, the clear direction, sharper ideas and useful information you may gain can make your work much more effective.



If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in You Can Write for Magazines by Greg Daugherty.

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

For some, the promise of technology for easy access to information that was supposed to make us more free has devolved into constant distraction that can feel like enslavement to a cell phone. Even people who have less extreme views might still feel that it is too easy to get lost in games and social media, browsing online instead of being present, procrastinating instead of getting things done.

 I’m in that camp. I’m not an obsessive user of my phone, but I have found it easy to reach for it in quiet times when I have nothing pressing. That used to be time I spent staring into space. That could be very relaxing time. More importantly, I came up with some of my best ideas in those times or shortly afterward. My brain was hard at work behind by vacant visage, but now it is hard at work scrolling Facebook or watching YouTube videos.

 Manoush Zomorodi took this problem to the listeners of her WNYC podcast, Note to Self, and challenged them to be more aware of their use of technology and wean themselves from it to some degree. That experience, with some refinements, is described in Bored and Brilliant, and Zomorodi hopes it will extend the challenge to a wider audience.

 I expected Zomorodi to focus on how technology has captured our attention and eroded our ability to concentrate. She touches on this. However, the theme of her book is that we need boredom for deeper cognition and creativity. In order to reach their most creative states, our brains need a break from stimulation—we need to get bored.

 The benefit of boredom, in addition to training us to handle tedious tasks, is that it put our mind into its “default state.” In this condition, our minds wander. We daydream. We can imagine things and make connections that would not be available to us if we were concentrating on something or stimulating our brains.

 The default state isn’t universally good. We can fall into ruminating on problems and failures, berating ourselves. That is not useful.

 However, for most of us daydreaming is positive. The lives we dream up for ourselves in such moments, Zomorodi refers to it as “autobiographical planning,” can help us identify what we want, solve problems and see ourselves as more capable.

 Zomorodi presents seven challenges to her readers. The idea is that readers would do one challenge a day for a week. Some of the challenges are adaptable for continued or periodically repeated practices. She describes how several Note to Self listeners responded to the challenges and made them their own.

 Bored and Brilliant is not about abandoning technology by a long shot. It is about making space in your life to think in different ways, especially for the daydreaming that arises in the dull, unstimulating moments in life.

 Zomorodi writes in a journalistic style. The book is not loaded with notes, or even a bibliography, like a more scientific text. However, she sites research, interviews with specialist and other books within the text. The benefits of boredom are documented. If you want to research the subject deeply, you might skim this book for other sources. If you want to loosen your ties to you cell phone or tablet, get out of the mental rat race and give your brain space for a deep breath, try the challenges in this book; it is a good place to start.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara A. Oakley

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Quiet by Susan Cain

 Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Myers, Walter Dean.  Just Write: Here’s How!  New York: Collins, 2012.

Walter Dean Myers is an author of mostly of books for children and young adults.  That is the primary audience for Just Write: Here’s How!

Myers makes no bones about it.  Writing is hard work.  Myers, and he believes most other successful writers, has a process that helps he prepare for, write, and complete books.  A writer needs to love the process of writing if he hopes to complete books and have them be of good quality.

Having said that, Just Write is not a highly technical book.  Myers’ process if fairly straightforward.  He uses a simple outline to get started (actually two: one for fiction and one for nonfiction).  He fleshes these out into more detailed outlines.

Preparation is important to Meyers.  Partly this is the hard work of putting together a good outline and developing an understanding of your main character.  He also advocates plenty of research.  Writers, especially when they are young, write about things they haven’t experienced personally, and research will serve both as a personal education and a source of authenticity for the book.

Don’t skimp on preparation and don’t shy away for rewriting.  Myers considers rewriting important.  He welcomes input from his editor that will make his books better.

Many examples come from Myers’ experience.  He especially draws upon his unexpectedly pleasant success co-writing Kick with Ross Workman, a teenager at the time they collaborated.  The process of working on Kick and other books provides illustrations for the points he makes.  He holds up Workman as an example of someone with the attitude, work ethic, an especially interest in the process of writing that leads to success as a writer.  Workman had the diligence and humility to learn, deal with feedback, and follow his book through to the end.

Workman also experienced the kind of crisis of confidence that Myers thinks is typical.  A young writer will need to face this crisis and find the courage to continue and improve his work.

Myers’ style in this book is informal, conversational and direct.  It is also personal.  He writes about how he came to be a writer and how it has affected his life.  He writes with a purpose, and that broader purpose to connect to and help kids has led him to speak to kids in trouble both to understand and to encourage them.  Though written for youth, it may be a good place to start for budding writers of any age.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

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How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Bayard, Pierre. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Regarding talking about books you haven’t read, Pierre Bayard might echo the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” Books are so much a part of a larger culture, so quickly forgotten and so interpreted through the internal experiences of readers that having read one brings little advantage to discussing it.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read has three major parts, possibly an accidental homage to the lessons of a composition class. Bayard considers the issue of reading and non-reading (and how hard it is to tell one from the other), the social context of talking about non-read books and offers a new model for discussing books.

Reading is largely a matter of non-reading. We can’t possibly read every book there is, so the choice to read some is necessarily a choice to not read others, and a cultured person may choose to not read any of them. We may read every page or skim, and skimming may be a better way to understand a book as a whole. Even when we read a book, we immediately start to forget it. We hear about books we haven’t read.

This puts us in the position of talking about books we haven’t read (at all, or just skimmed, or forgot) whenever we discuss books. Bayard describes several such social situations, throughout building a case that what we really end up discussing is virtual book, made up of our own internal conceptions of the book and its place in the common library of our culture (including other books we probably haven’t read). He argues that we can’t exactly discuss a book because of all the factors of non-reading. Instead, a book becomes a pretext for discussion, a mental place for building common ground for communication (or so completely devoid of common understanding that people end up talking to themselves in exchanges with others).

In light of all of this, Bayard recommends laying aside the grade school shame of non-reading and discussing books anyway. He carries this pretty far, arguing that books are not fixed and we invent books out of our non-reading rather that discuss the books themselves. Discussions about books are really means of discovering and expressing ourselves.

Bayard can make our interactions with books seem so abstract and subjective that it may truly be best to not read them at all. Since he is a literature professor and an author, he probably doesn’t want people to actually go that far. His point is to get away from a narrow view of books and reading that limits the way people talk about them and move toward more creative and cultured engagement.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Prior to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, I had seen it referenced by others in relation to the so-called “10,000-hour rule.” This is the concept that mastery of a complex skill takes about 10,000 hours of practice. This idea is not original to Gladwell, but his book popularized the concept.

That is not at all the point of Outliers. Instead, Gladwell takes on myths of success, especially the myths of genius and the self-made man. Certainly people of extraordinary achievement are intelligent and hard-working, but Gladwell shows that they also the beneficiaries of opportunities provided by their culture, sometimes very unique opportunities.

To start, Gladwell tackles our enchantment with intelligence (or talent). He describes research that shows that intelligence matters very little after it reaches some threshold. Once someone has enough intelligence to succeed at something, whether he succeeds for the degree of his achievement is not determined by intelligence. Other things are more important.

One of those other things is the amount of work someone puts into improving a skill (going back to the 10,000-hour rule). Even for a very motivated person, it is hard to put 10,000 hours into learning and improving any complex skill, especially while relatively young. Drawing from many cases (including Bill Gates and Mozart), high-achievers were enabled by opportunities provided by the culture (family, economic situation, law, technological development, etc.). In addition, they gained their mastery at a time when those abilities were highly valued (another cultural contribution that is often time-limited).

After establishing this foundation, Gladwell looks at other aspects of culture and success. Culture can contribute to success and hinder it. Cultures are persistent, yet some have found ways, at least in certain contexts, of overcoming limits to opportunities and opening the doors to success.

Culture matters. We like stories of the lone genius or plucky rag-to-riches go-getter. Without discounting their talent or effort, Gladwell shows that these stories typically veil the many opportunities and lucky breaks that were available to these successful people that very often were not available to others.

The implication is that we rely on luck to produced highly successful people, and luck doesn’t strike often. We could create cultures that provide more opportunities for more people. There are plenty of smart-enough people. Many of them are willing to work hard at something meaningful (itself something that is a cultural heritage). We might have many more successful people, and even more of those extraordinary performers, if we got serious about providing opportunities for everyone.

Malcolm Gladwell also wrote

Blink

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School. 1944. New York: HarperOne, 2000.

I didn’t expect of find apologist C. S. Lewis discussing the Tao. He used it as a term to describe natural law or traditional values, which he defended in the three lectures collected in The Abolition of Man.

This is a hard book for me to write about, though it is short. Lewis wrote as a thoughtful and educated man to an audience he assumed could follow him. I don’t find it easy to summarize his arguments and do them justice, though I will try.

Lewis began by criticizing a trend in education that debunks emotion and sentiment in favor of reason. The particular English composition he used as an example rightly showed students how to see through the shallow sentimentality and factual falseness of bad writing, but failed to show the merits of good writing, worthy sentiments, or deeper truth.

The product of such an education is people without hearts. Instead of mastering reason, students were equipped with shallow reasonableness. By inoculating students against one kind of propaganda, the authors of the text made them more vulnerable to other propaganda.

For fruitful education, Lewis offers the Tao, teaching people to recognize and esteem the inherent value of things. As he puts it, “The right defence against false sentiments is just sentiments.”

Those who reject traditional values, even if not entirely conscious of it as may be the case of the textbook authors, are proposing new values. However, the tools they use to cut down the old work just as well on the new. They must either stick to the idea that values are cultural vestiges or conventions that have roots in unwanted sentiment instead of desirable reason, and lay the groundwork for future reasoners and reformers to overthrow the new values, or appeal to inherent, self-evident values. On this latter basis, the Tao has much history and endurance.


These ideas have real social consequence. This book was first published in 1944, so the Nazi regime in Germany was very much on Lewis’ mind, as well as then-rising Communism. Though the pseudoscience that the Nazis used to justify their racist policies has been debunked, and even the Soviet Union has crumbled, the idea that a more scientific and rational governance and policy will perfect, or at least greatly improve, human society is alive an well.

As we master nature, even human nature, we also give people who acquire and control that knowledge and technology mastery over other people. Successive generations of such people will grow in mastery over others and, raised with no heart or inherently true values, they will have nothing by which to govern themselves except their own appetites and desires. George Orwell’s vision would cease to be merely an imaginative projection of the excesses of socialism and become something close to prophecy.

Lewis doesn’t see reason and sentiment as being natural enemies, only that some have tried to position one against the other. His vision would be people educated to have within them both powerful reason and powerful sentiments, especially ethical sentiments.

My own experience makes this an attractive vision to me. As a child, I had experienced strong emotions, especially anger, that threatened to overwhelm me because I lacked maturity and self-control. As I got a little older, though still a child, I clamped down on my emotions and tried to comport myself according to reason a much as possible; Mr. Spock from Star Trek was my model. This became a problem, too, in that my life and relationships lacked fullness as I deprived myself and others of something important in my connections. Now that I am a man, and I am coming to see what the fullness of that can be, I long to have both a powerful mind and strong heart. To have one without the other sets one up for many falls, but to have them together is a synergistic combination that empowers one to have greater appreciation for and effectiveness in life.

C.S. Lewis also wrote:
The Great Divorce

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

January Featured Category

I normally feature self-help in January.  This year, I’d like to encourage people to read hard books.  Read a least one book that challenges you this year.  Maybe you can read a challenging book every month.  Stretch yourself; read something hard.  Check out the featured book to get some ideas on how to approach that hard reading.

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Many of us make New Year’s resolutions, but few of us keep them. There is less interest on the statistics of other goals, but it seems likely that resolutions are hard to keep whenever we make them. Self-help author and consultant M. J. Ryan would like to change that sorry state of affairs. Her book This Year I Will… has advice on how to turn goals into action and dreams into reality.

Ryan makes the important point that much of our behavior is habitual. We have repeated behaviors so many times that we unthinkingly return to them when we encounter the stimulus that triggers them. To complicate the matter, our behaviors fill a need or solve a problem. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t have become ingrained habits.

You don’t have to delve into you half-remembered childhood to change behavior, though. You just need to identify the underlying need or problem and find other means of dealing with them. Ideally, the new behaviors will also help you meet your goals instead of getting in the way.

I suppose I have made it sound easy.  It is not, and Ryan does not promise quick fixes. In fact, she warns her readers they will face internal resistance to change. There are parts of brain, power emotional parts that exert a lot of control over us, that see change as a threat and will not easily leave the familiar path. Ryan offers advice on how to handle this, and even how to get our emotional brain to help us instead of hinder our change.

The book is organized into short chapters. Ryan suggests you can go directly to the parts you need and return to the other parts later, or when they seem more useful. Instead of being a book you read through once, she wants This Year I Will… to be a reference you can return to when you need fresh ideas or a refresher on techniques you’ve used before.  Some of the subjects that stood out to me were

• concentrate on “what” instead of “why,”
• dealing with doubt,
• taking action,
• focusing on one or a few changes at a time,
• taking one step at a time (though sometimes we need a big goal to motivate us),
• track your progress (I’m a believer in this),
• have a Plan B (and C, and D…),
• tips for effective visualization,
• performance review, and
• remember to have fun.

There is more than that. The book is not a collection of unrelated mini-chapters. Though the book isn’t necessarily made to be read linearly, I found that later chapters tend to build on earlier ones. There is also a subtle shift from an almost wholly practical to a somewhat philosophical view. You’re not just doing a better job of setting and achieving goals. The goals you achieve and the habits you form shape and define your life.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Ryan, M. J. This Year I Will…: How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution, or Make a Dream Come True. New York: MJF, 2006.

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March Featured Category

Though we could be celebrating Women’s History Month or St. Patrick’s Day, we’re continuing to focus on hard books. Challenge yourself with our featured book or another hard book.

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

Reed, Kit. Mastering Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1991.

Kit Reed doesn’t believe there is a magic book that will tell you everything you need to know about writing. Her book, Mastering Fiction Writing, will help you get started and contains a lot of advice on making your stories better.

The first key is that learning to write comes from practicing writing. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. No story is perfect, so start writing and improve your work as you proceed.



An encouraging tip from Reed is that you already have a great storehouse of experience to draw upon as a writer. All the experiences of your own life, the lives of people you know and everything you’ve heard about and learned are the raw material you already have in your head. As a writer, you’ll use all of this, not directly but transformed for the purposes of your stories.

Reed is not a fan of plot, believing that stories are developed and preferring let her characters and what they want lead her. She does believe in outlining. An outline can help a beginning writer get a story in shape and avoid problems before starting. Even in the middle of a story, outlining can help with diagnosing problems and figuring out where the story needs to go.

The book also covers other common elements of fiction writing. This includes style, character, point of view, voice, rewriting and establishing your work habits.

A particularly useful element of the book is that almost every chapter contains a list of questions you can ask yourself about that element in your story. You could use these questions at any point in developing a story to help you recognize problems and create solutions.

The final chapter is also particularly useful. It deals with discipline. A writer isn’t going to produce stories, and especially not books, if he doesn’t do the work, deal with the problems and overcome the occasional boredom, hard work and temptation to quit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

How to Write Horror Fiction by William F. Nolan

Nolan, William F. How to Write Horror Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 1990.

William F. Nolan (author of Logan’s Run and other horror tales) takes a conversational, even light, tone in How to Write Horror Fiction. For Nolan, a good scare is good fun.

Nolan begins the book with his on introduction to horror stories and a discussion of why people read them or see horror movies. People get a thrill and a sense of relief from facing death and overcoming it, even if only vicariously. Maybe especially vicariously.

The book focuses on the particulars of writing horror. Nolan discusses at length what works in horror stories. He illustrates this through examples drawn from a number of authors. He also provides a step-by-step discussion of horror elements by working through one of his own stories. The book contains general tips for writers, but it doesn’t talk as much about the general mechanics and practices of writing.

He has some tips for breaking into the horror market. The upside is there is a lot of demand for horror and places for new writers to break in. The down side is that those open segments of the market pay poorly if they pay at all. Though not well paying, many of the lower market periodicals are serious about quality and finding good new authors, so writing for them can be a good place to build a portfolio while building skill. Film and television can be a lucrative market for writers, though it is hard to get into (after gaining success as a writer elsewhere, most likely after having book optioned for adaption to film).

Some of the references are dated, as one might expect from a book that is almost 20 years old. However, Nolan includes an appendix that lists a number of horror anthologies. Most are probably out of print by now, but also probably cheaply available as a used books. For someone looking to read good horror stories, or to develop a sense of what works as a writer, these books will still be good.

Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers

Brothers, Chalmers. Language and the Pursuit of Happiness. Naples, FL: New Possibilities, 2007.

The central theme of this book is that language is pervasive in the human environment and that actions in language have consequences in our lives. We can take actions in language that lead to better results.

Brothers draws ideas from a number of areas including language, learning and mind-body connection. Though the chapters committed to this material have exercises associated with them, they mostly serve as background material. The first half of the book is committed to describing these concepts.

Most of the second half is committed to describing different type of language actions. Each is summarized below.



Assertions and Assesments. Assertions are statements of fact; they can be proved or disproved. Assessments are judgments and opinions; they may be valid or supportable, but they are not verifiable like facts. People run into trouble by treating unhelpful assessments as if they are true assertions.

Declarations. Declarations created possibilities or context. With declarations, we may initiate, conclude, resolve or assess. Declarations are powerful because of the context they create, defining for us what is and is not possible.

Requests and Offers. Requests and offers are actions in language by which we try to achieve a desirable future that might otherwise go another way. Requests and offers are similar to declarations in that they are creative actions, but they go farther in enlisting others in undertaking some action to achieve a desired future result.

Promises, Commitments and Agreements. Promises are important because of the effect of keeping or not keeping them. Broken promises break our trust, relationships, success and self-esteem. Kept promises improve these things. Because of this, it is important to manage our commitments, taking responsibility to fulfill them or renegotiate them when we cannot.

I found the book a little hard to read. I think this was partly due to the layout of the book and the use of several forms of emphasis. The concepts seemed somewhat disjointed, and the author’s attempts to tie things together resulted in some wordiness. I felt the not especially long book was a long read.

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Beattie, Melody. Make Miracles in Forty Days: Turning What You Have Into What You Want. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.



Melody Beattie doesn’t guarantee that her book Make Miracles in Forty Days will deliver definitive miracles in that exact timeframe. Readers would rightly be skeptical if she did.

Beattie can sound New Age-y, referring to God, a Higher Power, and Life almost synonymously. This may be a way to acknowledge some sort of god without being too sectarian, in the manner of twelve step programs. Even so, she presents her method as something that operates on universal law, independent of religion or belief.

Her perspective on miracles is a little different, too. Miracles aren’t necessarily big. Miracles aren’t supernatural; they're natural in the sense that they are the results of universal laws. They are extraordinary, however, because they are beyond our power to bring about on our own.

These things don’t put the book too far out from its kindred on the self-help shelves. It’s not typical, though, in that Beattie turns some typical self-help concepts on their heads. It is far from your typical gratitude list. It is certainly not positive thinking. If anything, it may seem like an opportunity to indulge in the type of thinking proponents of The Secret and their ilk would have you avoid.



The heart of the method is this: express gratitude for the things for which you are least grateful. All the stuff that hurts you, negative feelings, and the things that make you nuts are candidates for these expressions of gratitude, even if you don’t feel remotely thankful.

You may have things for which you can’t say you’re thankful. That’s okay. Beattie writes about those issues.

How does this create miracles? Beattie doesn’t explain. She doesn’t seem interested in picking it apart. It came to her in a moment of inspiration, at a low time in her life, and it worked for her. It has always worked for her since. She has taught her method to a few others and it worked for them.

Part of the miracle method is that it provides permission to acknowledge and release emotions. The relief that comes from that may be a miracle to many. Maybe it provides perspective. Maybe it reveals what we truly want and don’t want so we start making better decisions. Maybe it’s magic.

There are many examples in the book. She draws on her own story and on the experiences of others. It may be hard to say they had miracles. They seem to be happier, and if gaining happiness was something beyond their own power, it fits the definition Beattie uses. Many might find happiness to be miraculous.

Melody Beattie also wrote
Gratitude

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
365 Thank Yous by John Kralik
The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith
Thanks! by Robert A. Emmons
Write It Down, Make It Happen by Henriette Anne Klaus

In contrast to this book, here are some more traditional self-help volumes
Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell
Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale
The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
The Success Principles by Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer
You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

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