Over Labor Day weekend I finished reading the first half of Tom Bird's boo
k The Call of the Writer's Craft
(which for some reason, Amazon.com sells but the posted picture is of the wrong book cover). The first half deals with getting you to get the writing done, and the second half of the book deals with getting you to get your work published. Make no mistake, Tom Bird wants you to be a working writer, not some namby-pamby artiste.
If Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way
) is the writing world's kind, caring therapist -- maybe a little too woo-woo spiritual to be a true Oprah, but not too far off either -- and Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird
) is the writer's Woody Allen, laughing and learning from her own neuroses, then Tom Bird is its Dr. Phil.
Tom Bird and Dr. Phil have the same no-nonsense approach. I get the sense that Tom Bird wants you to do better and be happier, but he's not gonna hold your hand through months of therapy, he's gonna tell it like it is. Namely: to write a book, you have to get in the raw word count. The first half of The Call of the Writer's Craft is tips and strategies for getting over yourself and getting words on the page.
Bird claims you can write a full length book in 3-5 weeks working two hours a day, six days a week. When I first heard this I thought it sounded too much like an infomercial for a fad diet. But the "real diet" science is being it. Real diet = burn more than you eat. Book in 3 weeks = getting several thousand words on the page every day. I still can't figure out why I was originally skeptical; I've done NaNoWriMo's before.
Also quite amusing are Bird's asides where he relays success stories from people who've taken his class. The best part of these tales is that Bird almost always describes each of these people as approaching him in a manner that he found awkward, annoying, off-putting or petulant. Then he snapped them out of their annoyingness and they succeeded! I have no idea how many writers the world can credit Tom Bird with helping (the number is likely written in the books somewhere), but it can credit him with making at least a dozen people less petulant.
Switching gears from tough love writing book to tough love writing essay, there's this fabulous essay ... or should I say letter to a young writer--although I have to say that Rilke 
was never quite this forthright or fresh. I like it. (Found via Margosita).
Both pieces encourage us to write like a motherfucker.
