3.5 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
Writing sounds like an ideal job. Indoors, no heavy lifting, you can set your own hours, and you can tie it in with a bit of surfing the web for research… But it turns out that it isn’t that easy, and yet people still do it.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.- Neil Gaiman
If you do manage to turn that blank space into your best work yet, you then have to satisfy the whims of an editor who is highly likely to reject it. Who’d be a writer?
It is a cruel way of baring your soul to the wider world, but yet people still do it. Reading through the short essays in the book I was struck by how a number of authors suffered from mental health problems, perhaps the words need to be forged in the inner pain. And in all that suffering, we, the readers, have some insight into the mind of another person. A different perspective of someone you have never met.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. – Neil Gaiman
I did like this, but I thought that this was brutal at times, Marche does not hold back in his thoughts on the struggles of writers, but in that bleak outlook is a dark humour that really appeals to my sense of humour. I had wanted to be a writer many years ago and even signed up for a course, but now I don’t think that I could, the fear of rejection is too much, just writing reviews on a blog is enough for me. I did think that there wasn’t a wide enough spectrum of authors in here.
I kind of want to pass this to an author that I know, but don’t know how it will affect them; though I suspect they would agree wholeheartedly with it.
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