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
