Most of the thinkers and leaders that have become writers recommend this book. I now see why.
It’s non-fiction that read like fiction due to the amazing storytelling abilities of this author. Not many books/movies/situations make me cry. It might or it might not happened that this book got a few tears out of me.
If you want to become a better writer, read it. Period.
Flow: 5/5, it can be read in a few days.
Actionability: 5/5, lots of actionable principles
Mindset:5/5, the lessons learned here will be applicable to you as a writer but also to many other aspects in life
Some Of My Highlights:
-
“This is a difficult country to look too different – in the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it, – and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified.”
-
“Do it every day for a while’ my father kept saying. ‘Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.'”
-
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
-
“The act of winning turns out to be its own reward.”
-
“But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.”
-
“…hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”
-
“Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent.”
-
“…awareness is learning to keep yourself company.”
-
“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”
-
“The climax is that major event, usually toward the end, that brings all the tunes you have been playing so far into one major chord, after which at least one of your people is profoundly changed.”
-
“…good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.”
-
“You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.”
-
“We start out with stock characters, and our unconscious provides us with real, flesh-and-blood, believable characters.”
-
“Try to remember that to some extent, you’re just the typist. A good typist listens.”
-
“But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality… Reality is unforgivingly complex.”
-
“So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.”
-
“Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.”