Review: Definitely for Writers!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 23, 2013
Every writer needs a pick-me-up now and again.  Writing fiction for a living tends to be a solitary pursuit.  No matter how many agents and editors are involved, no one really knows what it feels like to sit and work for hours and days and weeks and months – except another writer.Ann Patchett is another writer.  I stumbled onto her writing memoir, The Getaway Car, by accident, but it’s a book that I’ll be going back to again and again, the way I do Stephen King’s On Writing and James Scott Bell’s Plot And Structure.Where both of the latter two books concentrate on technique, though, Patchett tells a very personal story of hardship and desperation.  Not only that, but she understands exactly how I feel about committing a story to the page.  Her butterfly analogy, though not what I would have chosen, echoes exactly the feeling I have every time I finish a book:  it’s just not what I had in mind and I’m sure I can do better.  Every time.She goes through the same idealistic thing that I do, that the book I happen to be working on at the time just isn’t going to be as good as it should, but that the next one will be magic.  She also has the discipline to stay with the one at hand till she finishes so that she can get to the next.I haven’t read any of her books yet, but I will be.  And I’ll definitely be reading The Getaway Car again because it’s one of those books that speaks truly to writers.