Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual Paperback - 1989

First line

Writers will happen in the best of families.

From the jacket flap

From the best-selling author of "Rubyfruit Jungle and "Bingo, here is a writers' manual as provocative, frank, and funny as her fiction. Unlike most writers' guides, this one had as much to do with how writers live as with mastering the tools of their trade. Rita Mae Brown begins with a very personal account of her own career, from her days as a young poet who had written a novel no publisher wanted to take a chance on, right up to her recent adventures as a Hollywood screenwriter. In a sassy style that makes her outspoken advice as entertaining as it is useful, she provides straight talk about paying the rent while maintaining the energy to write; and dealing with agents, publishers, critics, and the publicity circus; about pursuingj ournalisim, academia, or screen-writing; and about rejecting the Hemingway myth of the hard-living, hard-drinking genius. In addition Brown, a former teacher or writing, offers a serious examination of the writer's tool--language, plotting, characters, symbolism--plus exercises to sharpen the ear for dialogue, and a fascinating, annoted reading list of important works from the seventh century to the late twentieth.

Media reviews

"Funny enough in  places to make you laugh aloud but honest enough to  weed out the weak of heart who think writing is made  by muses rather than writers' hard  work."--Columbus Sunday Dispatch

"A writer's manual that reads like a cross  between Writers Digest and Allan  Bloom's The Closing of the American  Mind."--The Washington  Post.

Citations

• Publishers Weekly, 02/03/1989, Page 0