Still Writing

Still Writing: 

The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

Genre: Non-fiction

Review: Dani Shapiro, memoirist and novelist, shares a little book full of wisdom about writing and life. The title is true to the content of the book. If you plan to live a writing life, you should learn about both the perils and the pleasures. The solitude, uncertainty, and anxiety, as well as the joy of flow, discovery, and delving deeper into yourself and your stories. This is honestly the best writing book I have read since Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I have a feeling I will keep coming back to many of these quotes...

My favorite quotes from the book:

Act as if…

“Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anyone to tell you its okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.” p.32

About Reading:

“Fill your ears with the music of good sentences, and when you finally approach the page yourself, that music will carry you. It will remind you that you are part of a vast symphony of writers, that you are not alone in your quest to lay down words…” p. 34

 “It allows the greatest consolation of literature, which is to pierce our separateness, to show us that, in this business of being human, we are not alone.” p.124 

On practice

 “If we are patient, if we place ourselves in the path of possibility, we might just find our own rushing current…Lives are made up of days. Days made up of hours, of minutes, of seconds during which we make choices, and those choices become practice.” p.131

“Why are we writing about this moment, and no other?” p.137

“It is the truest lesson I know about writing—and life—that we must always move in the direction of our own true calling, not anyone else’s.” p.192