The Poets & Writers Complete Guide To Being a Writer: Everything You Need To Know About Craft, Inspiration, Agents, Editors, Publishing and the Business of Building a Sustainable Writing Career
Edited by Kevin Larimer & Mary Gannon
Avid Reader Press, 2020

There is only one way to get from wanting to be a writer to being a writer, and that way is the grubby, quotidian work of writing. This grim, simple reality is thoroughly repulsive to most people, including most writers, “writer” having once been very accurately defined as “a person for whom writing is particularly difficult.” And as countless charlatans, frauds, and blowhards have discovered over the years, there’s a nice little lump of money to be made in the gap between that reality and that repulsion. Most people who dream of writing would literally rather do anything in Creation other than sit down and write, but they often prefer some useful illusion to cushion their lazy cowardice. Hence, writing colonies, writing seminars, writing webinars, writing workshops, writing magazines, and writing manuals. All very sensible, virtuous-seeming ways to avoid writing. 

Poets & Writers magazine has for years been an excellent example of these hypnotizing way-stations, these airport lounges that are oddly excerpted from time, neither journey nor destination, perfect for planning, bullet-pointing, and maximizing your strategizing in lieu of actually sitting down and writing. Every issue features checklists, themed articles, and  interesting interviews with authors (all of whom eventually sat down and wrote instead of reading about writing) … perfect matter for making yourself feel like you’re making progress, when in reality only writing is progress. I know people who never miss a single word of Poets & Writers and who haven’t written a word in years. I suspect there are legions of such people, and would that really be surprising? Writing - actually sitting down and grinding out the clumsy, fumbling prose that you hope will one day embody your vision - is dull, daunting, sordid work. It can’t be shared. It can’t be celebrated. It can’t be enjoyed until it’s over (and plenty of authors would tell you it can’t be enjoyed even then). Who wouldn’t want to avoid such a misery, if they could? 

Avoidance never looked so enticing as this big, wonderful new volume Poets & Writers has put out, a big, generous collection of their tips, stratagems, bullet points, commonplace quotes, and author interviews culled from the decades they’ve been helping writers and aspiring writers to procrastinate. The book’s various sections cover in elaborate detail all the steps along what is usually referred to as the writer’s journey: getting started, finding writing groups, assessing the market, applying to MFA programs, acquiring and partially domesticating an agent, handling rejection, working with an editor, and all the rest. 

The book includes original essays by George Saunders, Jennfier Acker, Adam Haslett and half a dozen others. It includes copious reading lists, including an enormous list of books about writing and an equally-enormous list of literary and writing podcasts. And the time-honored fashion of writing manuals, there’s also a big section of quotes about writing, and this one is downright delicious. There are longer bits of wind, but also writers being both pithy and vapid, like Colson Whitehead saying, “What isn’t said is as important as what’s said,” and pithy and pointed, like Tom Wolfe saying, “First, entertain.” 

And of course our editors are always present themselves. Kevin Larimer and Mary Gannon are uniformly upbeat and encouraging, and they have the kind of steely nerve you can only develop when it’s your job to spin platitudes for 30-odd pages every other month while simultaneously sniffing at the very idea:

This isn’t intended as some kind of banal platitude to illustrate the bigger picture, but rather a reminder of the incredible freedom and power afforded the creative writer. Because if we can agree that there is no summit, no highest peak upon which a writer, after years of struggle, can rest, having accomplished it all … then suddenly the path takes on different dimensions. Indeed, the path becomes as wide as your imagination will allow. 

It could be easily predicted that a big book on writing by Poets & Writers would be a maximal combination of interesting and useful, but even so, The Poets & Writers Complete Guide To Being a Writer (insert 5000 word subtitle here) exceeds expectations. Every aspiring writer should buy a copy, lay it flat on their desk, place their laptop on top of it, and get to work. And every writer, every person who’s already writing every day, will have a terrific one-stop book to consult.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.