Still writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, Dani Shapiro, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2013.
Here's my review in one sentence: This is the best book about writing that I've ever read.
And here's my review in a few sentences: After more than thirty years of teaching writing workshops, Shapiro has distilled her hard won wisdom into a series of vignettes from her life, practical tips, suggestions, and observations about writing that I found delightful to read.
Dani is a superb writer. With her book organized into short, succinct, pithy chapters, I found myself enjoying it in quenching sips. I learned and was inspired each time I read it. And each time I returned, I was in a state of anticipatory pleasure. I was never disappointed. Even as I read Still Writing, I knew I was reading something very special; and I felt special and privileged to be reading it, too.
While other books about writing cover some of the same topics, reading Shapiro's words got me bubbling with excitement to write. No other writing book I've read did that to the degree and with the consistency that Still Writing did for me. I wanted to sit down and start writing the moment I started reading her. The wonder was that I was able to finish reading her book at all.
The most marvelous thing about the way Shapiro writes is her inclusive, personal style that invites readers into her book and into her life. Reading her, I felt she was writing to me alone.
She used so many details drawn from her real life that by the end of the book you know a lot about her. If you're like me, you develop a fondness for her. It's easy for me to imagine that if I were to meet Dani Shapiro at one of her readings, I might approach her like an old friend, when it fact we've never met.
Why does she call her book Still Writing? Because she thinks of writing as a practice, akin to a yoga practice, as something meant to be performed every day, or, at least, five days a week, which if practiced wisely and judiciously, will see one through one's entire lifetime.
She tells of writers who seemed to be on the verge of great fame and money who burned out and whose careers ended early.
Her wisdom on what it takes to maintain, to endure, a writing life over many decades is priceless: "The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and, at the same time, to take risks. To be willing to fail, not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. 'Ever tried, ever failed,' Samuel Beckett once wrote. 'No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'
Continues Dani Shapiro: "[The writing life] requires what the great editor Ted Solotoroff once called endurability. It is this quality, most of all that I think of when I look around a classroom at a group of aspiring writers. Some of them will be driven, ambitious for success or fame, rather than by the determination to do their best possible work. But of the students I have taught, it is not necessarily the most gifted, or the ones most focused on imminent literary fame (I think of those as short sprinters), but the ones who are still writing decades later."
Dani Shapiro is the only one I've run across who splays open the fallacy of the adage, "Write what you know about." It's not that there's anything wrong with this piece of advice in and of itself. The fallacy is in the shortsighted way in which this adage is usually interpreted. Taking a more nuanced approach, Shapiro writes, "There is a tremendous difference between writing from a place that haunts you, from the locus of your obsession and fear and desire, and writing about what you yourself have been through. We know more than we think we do."
Here are just a few examples of the wisdom we come across in her compact chapters:
In "Scars": Of all the facts of my early life that made me a writer, at or near the top, these two: I was an only child with older parents.
In "Riding the Wave": When you sit down to write, just be. Sit and be still. Be present. She writes: "It's hard, I know. I know just how hard it is, and I hate to tell you this, but it doesn't get easier. Get used to the discomfort."
And that, after all, is Dani Shapiro's prescription: Turn writing into a practice. Begin your practice each day by sitting still, by being present in the now.
In "A Short Bad Book" Dani writes about a friend of hers who started out to write exactly that, a short bad book, and how it was that announcing that intention to the world actually gave her a tremendous advantage so she could tackle a big, important story and wind up writing a best seller that took her many years to write. She short-circuited the willies that would have appeared if she announced to the world she actually intended to write a Large, Important Book. So each time you sit down to write, think to yourself, "All I want to do is write a short, bad book."
And in "Inner Censor": When you've written something you're sure others will hate, and your censor wants to shut you up, and delete what you've just written, Dani suggests, "Don't fight it, just recognize her. Say to your inner censor, 'Oh, hello. It's you again.' Accept her coexistence."
By the time I finished reading Still Writing, I felt I had bonded with a new, best friend. I couldn't help myself: Writing saved Dani Shapiro's life, just as writing saved my life. We survivors have to stick together.
