LAWRENCE BLOCK - WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE (1986)

 

Synopsis/blurb ...

The home version of Lawrence Block's famous seminar for writers! 

In the 1980s, Lawrence Block developed an interactional seminar that adapted elements of the human potential movement specifically for writers. For several years, he and his wife, Lynne, traveled the country conducting seminars that focused on the inner game of writing and designed to enable participants to get out of their own way and put their best work on paper.

This book was written to make the seminar available to a larger audience, and at a lower price. Block self-published it in 1986, in an edition of 5,000 copies, which sold out in short order. A few years later, he stopped offering the seminar, having tired of the guru trip and preferring to concentrate on his own writing, and ever since, the book's been impossible to obtain.

When e-books came around, Block arranged for Harper Collins to publish Write for Your Life in that format. But it's the sort of text one wants to be able to page through, and a printed book is just more user-friendly. In the fall of 2013, an assistant found the last box of 25 copies of the 1986 edition in a storage cupboard; Block offered them in a newsletter, and they sold out within three hours.

This is the original book, with a foreword bringing it up to date. With the book, as with the seminar, it doesn't matter at all where you are in your writing career or what kind of writing you do. That's all beside the point. Write for Your Life is about making the best out of what you are and who you are.

And now, with the e-book and subsequent print editions of Write for Your Life continuing to find an eager audience, we’re delighted to make the book available for the first time in audio. 

Pretty self-explanatory ..... not a murder mystery, not noir, not a police procedural, not PI fiction, not a cosy, no real intrigue. Just some self-help lessons for writers from a writer; someone who has being making his way in the world of words for longer than I've been alive.

I liked it. Some of the confidence building tools are applicable to other facets of life, or they would be if I could remember them. (Two months on from listening to this one, I actually can't!)

Overall and in spite of the fact that I have no pretensions to turn my hand to writing, other than penning love letters to my wife, I enjoyed it. Block chatting about physics or nuclear science, albeit relayed by a third party, would keeps me amused and it made a change from the relentless rivers of crime and mystery fiction that I love and enjoy, but sometimes overdose on.

4 from 5

Read - (listened to) November, 2021

Published - 1986

Page count - 188 (5 hrs 40 mins)

Source - Audible purchase

Format - Audible