Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

"Everything I know about life, I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write."

From the best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate and eloquent companion to living a creative life.

Through a blend of deeply personal stories about what formed her as a writer, tales from other authors, and a searching look at her own creative process, Shapiro offers her gift to writers everywhere: an elegant guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course. "The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks." Writers--and anyone with an artistic temperament--will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro brings her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

Like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and Stephen King's On Writing, Dani Shapiro's Still Writing is a lodestar for aspiring scribes and an eloquent memoir of the writing life.

• ISBN10: 0802121403
• ISBN13: 9780802121400
• Publish Date: 1 October 2013
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 18 March 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[celinenyx]

There is a lot of good in here, and Shapiro's personal style is admiring. Still Writing is not so much a book on how to write, but what it's like to write for a living. Writing is not easy and often requires courage and stamina, yet is also beautiful and fragile and joyful.

The downside to this book is that is was repetitive in its imagery. I got rather tired of the mention of Shapiro's chaise longe and her namedropping. I felt like deep down, there is a bit of classism running through this book, like how she often refers to "selling fish" as a non-creative, stable career. (Fisheries are struggling, dedicated fish shops are having a hard time competing with chain supermarkets)

For Shapiro writing is suffering, a ripping open of the soul - and here we just fundamentally differ. I write for the hopeful, joyous parts of myself. I write from a place of pleasure, not one of pain.

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Trigger warnings: death of parents, severe illness, ill newborn.