Walking on Alligators : A Book of Meditations for Writers

Rating:
Summary: Great Motivator -- and Inspiration -- for Writers
Review: For any writer, they will be faced some time in their writing life where they will be stumped. I believe this book is a book to help writers of today. If you are going to sit down and write for today, and need some inspiration pick up this book. Opening this book, you come to a page where there are two critiques. One that stuck out the most to me was one that summarized this book in just a paragraph. "Many writers thirst to know what other writers have to say about what they do, and how they do it...I find that suggestions and ideas from this book float back to me at odd times, like when I'm picking off the anchovies at the pizza restaurant, and I think, yes, I could try that," Adair Lara said. Susan has said that writers in this book are here to make a path for you. Agreeing with her, I feel that this book is to kick some rocks out of the way. Each page gives a message from a writer, a little story and a mediation to follow. Every mediation is appropriate in getting the point across to today's writers. This book is filled with many extrodianary writers helping you pave the path to your life as a writer. Ending, I leave you with, "You are ready to begin your life as a writer, write today, the curtain is up."

Rating:
Summary: Great Motivator -- and Inspiration -- for Writers
Review: I own two -- one copy for home -- and one for the office. Shaughnessy's book inspires me when I catch myself doing something other than the writing I'm supposed to be doing. And it does so with succinct, motivational, and sometimes philosophical paragraphs. Walking on Alligators is one of my top books for gift-giving, ever since I bought my first copies a few years go.

Rating:
Summary: The Alligator Review
Review: In Walking on Alligators, Susan Shaughnessy addresses writer's daily struggles. Her advice and truths provide help to move past the dilemmas, and offers confidence and courage to continue down the path of writing. The book is composed of 200 daily writer's meditations, beginning with a quote from a famous person such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Shaughnessy includes a short story about the conflict or struggle. The meditation is ended with a promise to improve the quality of writing today, by moving past the difficulties.
The conflicts addressed range from getting started with the piece and continuing to focus on the end result. The advice comes from Susan's own struggles during her writing career along with many other well-known authors. The most important piece of advice Susan shares is to start writing, "The only way to write it to write today. The writing you don't do today is lost forever. Tomorrow's may be better but it may depend on the less exciting groundwork you can lay today."
Susan addresses believing in your work, in your hunches and using creativity in your work. She enables writers to understand the importance of setting goals, creating better working conditions and "accepting there is no easy way to buckle down, so write anyways."
Although, the book doesn't offer a step by step detailed explanation on how to achieve the advice, the encouragement and support makes you feel as if you have a thousand writers helping you improve you success one day at a time.

Rating:
Summary: Writing with Alligators
Review: Susan Shaughnessy's "Walking On Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers" (HarperCollins; paperback; 203 pp.), is a hard-edged gem of a book that cuts to the often-irritated quick of the writing life.

Via her dually-delivered doses of other people's observations -- mots both juste and justified, whether from familiar figures or unexpected sources -- and her own pithy commentary, the willy and witty Shaughnessy again and again lays a prickly grid of reality over the nebulous field of endeavor in which I toil, rendering it in clearer focus.

I've been working at the word trade for nearly 30 years as reporter, feature writer, and documentary filmmaker. I punched through the first 20 of those years without benefit of access to "Alligators." If I'd been able to avail myself earlier of the insights codified by Shaughnessy in her 1993 volume, I'd have been a wiser and perhaps better writer at a younger age. I'd certainly have avoided or at least short-circuited many of the soul-grinding, spirit-stifling, energy-draining habits of mind and contractual entanglements that dot the terrain of freelance writing like so many plastic anti-personnel mines.

Last fall, while teaching a Smithsonian Associates course on feature writing, I held up my copy of "Walking On Alligators" and told my students, "Get a copy of this book and read it. Even if you don't go on to become a writer, you'll be a better person for having read it." I say the same thing now to you.

Rating:
Summary: Writing with Alligators
Review: Susan Shaughnessy's "Walking On Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers" (HarperCollins; paperback; 203 pp.), is a hard-edged gem of a book that cuts to the often-irritated quick of the writing life.

Via her dually-delivered doses of other people's observations -- mots both juste and justified, whether from familiar figures or unexpected sources -- and her own pithy commentary, the willy and witty Shaughnessy again and again lays a prickly grid of reality over the nebulous field of endeavor in which I toil, rendering it in clearer focus.

I've been working at the word trade for nearly 30 years as reporter, feature writer, and documentary filmmaker. I punched through the first 20 of those years without benefit of access to "Alligators." If I'd been able to avail myself earlier of the insights codified by Shaughnessy in her 1993 volume, I'd have been a wiser and perhaps better writer at a younger age. I'd certainly have avoided or at least short-circuited many of the soul-grinding, spirit-stifling, energy-draining habits of mind and contractual entanglements that dot the terrain of freelance writing like so many plastic anti-personnel mines.

Last fall, while teaching a Smithsonian Associates course on feature writing, I held up my copy of "Walking On Alligators" and told my students, "Get a copy of this book and read it. Even if you don't go on to become a writer, you'll be a better person for having read it." I say the same thing now to you.