Books to Help you Write Books
Recommendations that will help you get personal in print
Have you ever wondered how to turn your life into prose people would actually pay for? Luckily, Nancy Davidoff Kelton, writing workshop instructor and author of six books including Writing From Personal Experience, shared her most recommended reading to get you in the head-space of creating your own personal stories. So read up, and get ready for a great night of writing!
Sign up to attend Nancy’s writing workshop Wednesday, August 23.
“My father in his coffin looked better than most of the men I dated.”
First line of FINDING MR RIGHTSTEIN by Nancy Davidoff Kelton
“Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Big Think)
“Writing is an art form, a discipline, hard work. Creating scenes and word pictures — showing, not telling to convey loneliness or abuse or rage or whatever emotion the author is conveying — is art, not therapy.”
Nancy Davidoff Kelton
“Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy.”
Maya Angelou (The Daily Beast)
“When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there, and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate.”
Edna O’Brien (The Paris Review)
“Relax. Give up. Don’t push too hard. Do a little. Let it breathe. Let your mind use your time away from the computer and try to follow where it wants to go. All my life I have tried too hard at everything. I thought writing and editing was getting up at five and sitting down at six and getting up twelve hours later. Just do a little dab, run off, let it sit.”
George Hodgman (The Rumpus)
“I don’t think there is one way to write a memoir. Whatever works.”
Nancy Davidoff Kelton
“Why write? What is the dream to write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions, that would offer proof — through a scramble of words — that God exists? … Why do we write? Of course, the answer writes itself: ‘Because we cannot simply live.’”
Patti Smith (Yale News)
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