★★★☆☆ Not what I had hoped for

Writing Tools

Roy Peter Clark

In his Introduction to Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark talks down the whole idea of the "writer's struggle." He thinks writing should be easy and fun, and writer's block a thing that should not happen. OK, that works for me. I'm an old fart -- I've been reading all my life and writing most of it. I was a scientist, and let me tell you, an academic scientist does a LOT of writing. I have never had a serious problem with writer's block. It's not that it never happens, but I have found strategies to get out of it or bypass it, and they work. To my surprise, Part Four, "Useful Habits," of Writing Tools was, in large part, a list of exactly those strategies of mine.

That was what I found over and over: Clark gives good advice that I don't need, because I already do it. This even turns out to be true of advice I thought I wasn't following. For instance, Clark's Tool 15 is "Pay attention to names." I read that and thought to myself, "I don't do that, do I?" As it happens I recently wrote four bits of prose for creative writing classes I'm enrolled in. So I looked at those, and these are the names I had invented: Flash Harry, Yuki (from Japanese 雪, snow), Barra, (from 薔薇, rose), The Adversary, The Advocate, Eukosmos (from Greek "good world"), Asch (from Aschenputtel), Charlotte, and Anne. So, yeah, I do that.

This was a bit disappointing, because what I really hoped for was new strategies for writing well. What I got instead was a list of good ideas I already practice. For me it is intuitive -- Clark makes it explicit. As a mathematician I believe in the value of making the intuitive explicit. Thus Writing Tools is useful, but not in the way I had hoped.

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