Murder Your Darlings

October 15, 2019
A jam-packed book of advice for would-be writers. Poynter Institute senior scholar Clark (The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing, 2017, etc.) has become something of a guru when it comes to how-to writing books. Written in his usual easygoing, conversational, and encouraging style, his latest is a compilation of writing advice from more than 50 of his favorite books about writing. Covering a wide range of topics, including language and craft, voice and style, storytelling and character, and rhetoric and audience, the author focuses on one or two writing lessons from each book. In each chapter, Clark also provides a pedagogical "Tool Box" of ideas and suggestions and "Lessons" for students to try out: "Read a lot and write a lot"; "Write Up to your readers, not Down." The book's title comes from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing (1916), in which the author suggested, "Draft, purge, murder. Before you murder that darling, you must create it." Clark argues that William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style is the "great-granddaddy" of all books on writing. For "millions of reluctant writers," it told them that the "writing craft is not an act of magic, but the applied use of both rules and tools." Besides the old standards, there are some nice surprises--e.g., George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, a "must read" that "was published in a significant year: 1776." Stephen King's "odd bit of advice" in On Writing--to read "bad writing so you can learn what not to write"--is practical and wise. Clark deftly mixes writing advice with personal memoir and toots his own horn in an appendix that includes summaries of his own books, including Writing Tools--"more than 200,000 copies have been sold in several formats." A generous, witty, and exuberant teacher inspires writers to "know more and feel more."

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December 1, 2019
Clark has been teaching writing, and writing about writing, for decades as a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a world-renowned institute of journalism. In his sixth book on the craft Clark (How to Write Short, 2013) guides readers through the daunting task of choosing the most beneficial writing guides. He recommends and reviews 50 of his favorite books that explain either how to write or how to live as a writer, dividing recommendations into six categories: language and craft; voice and style; confidence and identity; storytelling and character; rhetoric and audience; mission and purpose. His picks include famous classics and hidden gems by authors whom Clark considers friends and contemporaries. What emerges is an all-encompassing guide to a life spent with words, which blends together ideas like Aristotle's concept of catharsis, Stephen King's commitment to daily output, and Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon's advice for English language usage in the digital age. Reading Clark is like sitting in on a conversational master class. Writer-readers will clamor for more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)