Writing Without Teachers

Rating:
Summary: freewriting + public review
Review: In addition to free-writing, and the overall strategy of how to write a theme with limited time (commented by earlier reviewers), the author also shows the importance of getting feedback on your writing. He encourages you to organize groups of like-minded authors to review each other's writing. There is a very specific protocol for this... and its easy to screw up, so you really need to get the book to find out the details.

Without such feedback you will not be able to understand what the reader is thinking as he reads your work. Elbow is not describing how to get "feedback" but how to understand the effect your writing has on the reader. In these meetings each individual describes what was going on in his head, what he remembers... not whether he liked your work. Thus, you see the effect.

All three of my Peter Elbow's books have been extremely helpful. My only complaint is that his writing is too wordy. However, his wordiness is pleasant to endure. This book is easily worth a 5 out of 5.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Rating:
Summary: Don't edit while you write! Write first, edit later.

Review: Since I first read Writing without Teachers in 1985, I've written - or helped write - proposals that have won 8-figure engineering contracts. (Yes, that's $10M+.) Prior to reading this book, I'd never written a winning proposal. I owe Peter Elbow a lot!

His most useful prescription is not even the core of the book, but it literally taught me how to write. It's this: if you have to write something you understand, you have only four hours, and you don't know where to begin, do the following.

Hour one: write for an hour without stopping, editing, organizing, or trying to do well; stop at the end of the hour and identify your strongest points.

Hour two: start with those points, write just as you did in the first hour, and then extract your best points.

Hour three: same routine again.

Hour four: now that you know what you're talking about, capture your best points, organize, and write a structured final draft. Sounds simple, but it's the best advice for breaking through writer's block I've ever heard.

Peter Elbow's prose style is simple and straightforward. He's not quite as much fun to read as Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) or William Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade) or Lawrence Block (too many to mention), but his advice was so well-timed that I owe him - big-time.

Rating:
Summary: Alternative view to writing
Review: There are some great ideas in this book, it presents some fanstastic building points for any kind of writing. It's a little unconventional, and if you do everything he says, you might find you confuse your readers. But brain-opening all the same.