1. How to Become A Famous Writer Before You’re Dead by Ariel Gore: Okay, so to be honest, this book is more about how to achieve success as a writer, which comes from public recognition of your work, but it’s definitely one of my favorites on the subject of writing. As I mentioned in my review of the book for Fiction Writers Review, it’s not a free ride, but it’s definitely within reach if you’re serious about success. And the advice Gore gives comes from a variety of perspectives, asking famous writers from all genres to explain their methods for achieving fame, if not fortune as well. If you’re at all DIY in your perspective, you’ll find this book incredibly helpful, because it’s not aimed at the traditional path of writing a book, getting an agent, getting signed by a big-deal publisher, and continuing to write bestsellers, Stephen King-style, for the rest of your life. There are alternatives, and Gore gives them in style.
2. The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers by Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) and Glenn Murray (Divine Write): This is a brand-new e-book, published by the hugely popular ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, and it’s well worth the introductory price of $9.97 (which is going up to $29.97 after the first two weeks). The book is literally a checklist of items that you can use each time you post to your blog, with the intent of improving your writing as well as your hits and, ultimately, your sales. Yes, it’s a copywriting book, but as Darren and Glenn point out, writing for the web is a hybrid of copywriting and storytelling. How do you tackle this brave new world of blogging? Well, you probably ought to get advice from a dude who was able to quit his job and blog full time, don’t you think? You can score a copy from the ProBloger site. Click here to view more details.
3. The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer: As I mentioned in my previous post, “Reading as Rx,” this is for all you writers out there. Yes, I know, it’s about playwriting specifically. But don’t scratch it off your list if you write short stories, novels or even poems. It’s essential reading for all writers looking to build dramatic stories, because it discusses Aristotle’s Poetics in a modern way. (If you don’t know wtf the Poetics are, and you’ve been through any type of creative courses in your life, then god help you, cus your teachers have all had their heads up their asses.) Plus, Spencer is incredibly well-read and peppers his pointers with references to well-known works you should have already read, thereby suggesting in a very subtle way that if you haven’t, you should, forthwith. Seriously, dudes, it’s a creative writing degree in a book, probably the only practical book I’ve saved from my own days as a university writing student, which I reference whenever I find myself in a jam, and it’s totally worth the $16 to get a copy. All the rest are, as they say in Philosophy circles, mere footnotes to Plato (who was Aristotle’s teacher).
4. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott: The subtitle of this oft-referenced and absolutely fantastic book is “Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” and Lamott delivers both in alternating funny and poignant ways. One of her best chapters is entitled “Shitty First Drafts,” and suggests that even perfectionists must abandon their ideas of perfection just to get something on paper. The shitty first draft can be thrown away or edited until it’s perfect. Either way, you still need to get that awful crap down on paper so you know what you’re trying to say and have something to work with. The book is great for people whose expectations of themselves are so high that they believe they must write ALL or NOTHING. Lamott has given herself permission to fail, and passes this wisdom along to the reader. Another great suggestion? Don’t EVER buy fancy notebooks; they will only make you feel pressured to avoid writing shitty first drafts in them. This is exactly why I love the ugly 25-cent notebooks with 60 pages in them. Mistakes must be made in defense of art, after all.
5. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published by Sheree Bykofsky and Jennifer Basye Sander: Normally, I tend to avoid both the Dummies’ and Idiot’s Guides, perhaps more for the fact that I don’t like to view myself as either a Dummy or an Idiot. However, this book is legitimately worth purchasing, especially if you have questions about the traditional book publishing process and how to navigate it. Whether you’re wondering how to write a non-fiction book pitch or have a novel finished and want to know how (or if you should bother) to get an agent, this book’s got logical answers. There’s also a CD-ROM full of helpful documents and templates that you can use to craft your own queries, pitches and proposals. A great practical reference manual for the business side of writing.Got any books you turn to for writing, publishing or promotional advice?

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As a student growing up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Zinn’s bestselling history textbook, A People’s History of the United States, was part of the syllabus for my junior year of high school, thanks to a hippie teacher of mine whom I didn’t entirely appreciate at the time (thank you, Ms. Davis!). While many high school students have been fed the standard My Country ‘Tis of Thee from K through 12, at least some of the students at my high school were exposed to the fact that maybe, just maybe, our government wasn’t always operating in our best interests, particularly when it came to things like the Vietnam War.

But step back in time to that “noble war,” WWII, where “the greatest generation” proved themselves courageous crusaders against fascism. The unquestioned evil of Hitler and the unquestioned good of the Allied Powers are tackled by Zinn, who was himself a bombardier in the U.S. air force, dropping unnecessary napalm upon a seaside resort town in France called Royan. At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Zinn was a young married man, and could only view the headlines with youthful exuberance: the war was going to end, how could that be a bad thing?

As he explores the reality of the situation in his book, Zinn conveys his belief that ultimately, neither atomic bomb was necessary to end WWII, and in fact the seeming purpose of these bombings was to exhibit American ingenuity and technical prowess: we had nuclear bombs, and Russia didn’t. Thus the beginnings of the Cold War.

Even more interestingly, Zinn acknowledges his own culpability in the Royan bombings, which were also not strategically necessary, but showed off more American ingenuity and technical prowess with the invention of napalm. He comes to a Hannah Arendt-ish conclusion that evil is committed in the most banal of circumstances, by those who stand idly by and allow atrocities to be committed in their names, rather than by those who take up the task of barbarism like evil supervillains with maniacal laughter at the ready.

We are all culpable. We are all at fault. And we must all overcome our propensity for rage, racism and retaliation. Happily, Zinn points out that:

Against the claims of a violent “human nature” there  is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel.

And yet when it comes to rejecting evil and doing good, Zinn notes that “It is the immediate victims—or tomorrow’s—who have the greatest need, and the fewest wrenches. They must use their bodies (which may explain why rebellion is a rare phenomenon).”

I, siding with Zinn, propose that rebellion need not be difficult, nor even time consuming. Sure, we must use our bodies rather than wrenches in the machine, but we are creative, capable souls. All we really need are a few good books to start the journey, the healing, the revolution. Zinn quotes from classics like John Hersey’s Hiroshima (another book I was charged with reading, thanks to my progressive high school curriculum), as one of the books that began his own moral awakening. Readers of The Bomb might well cite Zinn’s work as an influential eye-opener, ushering in their own personal eras of peace and prosperity.

Here’s hoping.

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(For those who don’t do graphical interfaces, he tweeted “You need self-confidence and determination: feeling depressed and losing hope will never really help to correct any situation.”)

This guy is like a Tibetan fortune cookie, slapping me upside the head. I don’t regularly see his tweets in my Twitter stream, perhaps due to time zone differences, but this one was a perfect shakabuku. Lately, I’ve been swamped with “real” work (i.e. the stuff that pays my bills), which has been causing Naked Montreal to fall by the wayside. It’s been getting me down, and I started to feel depressed about it, like I would never get around to finishing this book. But it’s true: feeling depressed and losing hope don’t help. You’ve just got to get up early in the morning, give your cat some quick snuggles, and then get to work.

So here I am, working on my novel. And you know what? 5 AM never felt so good.

(Cross-posted from NakedMontreal.net)

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