Review: How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead

Title: How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights
Author: Ariel Gore
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: The author of several books presents her advice for launching a literary career.

Review: The advice in this book is by no means earth-shattering. You'll recognize most of it from other writing guides. Example: Want to be a writer? Then write. (Sure sounds simple, but I have yet to develop a habit of writing every day.)

But unlike most other writing guides, this book will keep you laughing while it injects you with a good dose of writing wisdom. This book also has some great ideas for exercises—for example, go through a piece you wrote and remove all adjectives and adverbs, rewriting where necessary.

Gore includes several interviews with literary stars, some more interesting than others. One of my favorite interviews was with Ursula K. Le Guin: "Stories are like feral kittens. You have to be very patient and careful and quiet and put out little bits of chicken on the floor."

The chapters in this book are fairly short and the advice is so fun to read that I'm going to get a copy of this to own.

(By the way, the first day of NaNoWriMo went well. I wrote over 1700 words, which keeps me on track to finish 50,000 by the end. 1 day down, 29 to go.)