Review: Excellent Advice From A Whacked Out Penmonkey
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 17, 2011
Chris Wendig dropped one too many hits of acid. And boy has it paid off.These nuggets of wisdom are indeed nuggets. Many of them are old hat. If you've been reading writerly advice for more than a year, then you've heard most of this advice already. But you haven't heard it quite this way. If your head is a brick and it hasn't sunk in yet, read 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer.Wendig clearly has a different audience than most writers giving advice. He writes for the loose-lipped, hip, nutty, insane, off-the-wall, wacky tacky writer. Like me.If you like Jethro Tull, you'll dig Wendig. If you are a Boy George fan, Wendig is your man. If you could sit all day and listen to Vangelis, let Wendig be your 666 (if that joke makes sense to, then you should definitely read Wendig).Chris Wendig likes to play off non-sequiturs, uses lots of word play, vernacular street jargon, gratuitous vulgarities, and a fair amount of self-linkage to his website/blog where he does more of the stand up routine. He really wants to help you. So he pulls out all stops and throws everything in his arsenal. And I mean everything.If you go to church every Sunday, wear Victorian clothing without pay, write YA novels, clean your children's mouths out with soap, or keep an eye out for the Easter Bunny, then you should probably not read 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer. It will help you become a better writer, but it will offend you and you'll stop writing out of sheer disgust. Oh, if you wear a pacemaker, turn it off before you open the book. It IS a digital book, and it's full of F-words.Want 500 really good laughs? Read the darn book. It worthy of a 4.5 rating.