Synopsis/blurb...
For 14 years, five-time Edgar winner and MWA grandmaster Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction for Writers Digest magazine. These columns yielded four books regarded as classics: Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, The Liar's Bible, and now, The Liar's Companion.
Listen to The Liar's Companion and gain inspiration to create outstanding fiction.
Another compilation of some of Lawrence Block's Writers Digest columns where he dispenses pearls of wisdom gathered from over fifty years (at time of writing) experience in the field.
Despite having no inclination to take up writing for either fun or profit, I quite liked the peek behind the curtains. There's a bit of repetition as some of the columns which appear consecutively inevitably give a hat-tip to his current novel either just published or about to be. I think in this instance it was Eight Million Ways to Die. I'm not complaining though.
I enjoyed the narration, the anecdotes, the odd reference to other writer's and the writing about writing - mis-steps, the sense of work sometimes going nowhere, abandonment, persistence, practise, discipline. I'm so glad I'm just a reader.
3.5 from 5
Read - (listened to) June, 2020
Published - 2011
Page count - 294 (9 hrs 38 mins)
Source - Audible download code received from David, one of LB's assistants
Format - Audible
That sounds so interesting, Col! Block has been so successful (and that's as much because he's so talented) that it makes sense to learn from him. For writers, I'm sure it's a gold mine of useful insights. And even for those who read, rather than write, it does sound like a good look behind the scenes.
ReplyDeleteI quite liked it Margot, not least because it almost seemed like a conversation with an enjoyable companion, albeit a one-way one. It made for a bit of a change from the usual.
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