Rebecca Reads

Any blocked artist, be he or she a painter, writer, or actor, can benefit from the positive course of action suggested by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. The Artist’s Way is the most powerful call for self-nurturing and creativity that I’ve ever read. I wish I’d found it years ago, because I feel it [...]

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Hemingway’s stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets.
I don’t usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, [...]

At age five, my mother was my scribe as I wrote my first book (”The Three Little Pigs”). Since then, I have wanted to be a writer.
I picked up Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, because it seems to be a commonly recommended book for aspiring writers. I’ve never read any Stephen King. I am not [...]

In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued:
“The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong [...]

Madeleine L’Engle’s first memoir, A Circle of Quiet, is a different kind of book. The back cover of my copy calls it “Spirituality/Autobiography,” but this isn’t your typical spiritual tome or autobiography. For me, it was a subtle encouragement to write, because I can and I want to.

I don’t usually reread children’s fantasy, but as I read one of Madeleine L’Engle’s memoirs, I decided to reread her most well-known novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

My writing teachers have always instructed to “show not tell.” I didn’t understand it, really, until I began to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden last month.