Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different

Published Aug. 8, 2020 by Grand Central Publishing.

ISBN:
978-1-5387-1795-0
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4 stars (4 reviews)

1 edition

“Kid [...] Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

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I'd enjoyed the essays I'd read over the years and read this book mostly over the course of a night I could barely sleep for. That might influence some of my following comments.

It's fun to me how I actually manage to disagree with some of the advice, genuinely not because I think I'm in any way better, I'm really not, but this book is very much Chuck Palahniuk's (and Tom Spanbauer's) approach to fiction writing and publishing goals - and Chuck warns as much right from the start! - so understandably there were certain things that didn't resonate with me (an hobbyist fan fiction writer - and I will return to that) or found quite odd actually - and in fact I can think of a whole school of authors who are not at all worse for the way they very much don't approach writing and teaching it like …

Review of 'Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Perhaps a little unfair of me to review and rate without finishing, but I don't see the point in forcing myself on when at page ten I'm wishing I were done.

I would never have thought to pick up a book on writing by Chuck Palahniuk because we're such very different people with very different styles, but there was a glowing review on Writer Unboxed so I thought I'd give him a shot. The very beginning was compelling, but when I got to "Textures", I hit a speed bump.

The idea of mixing narration, second-person instruction, and onomatopoeia is great advice for a specific kind of voice (to be fair, the authorial voice of someone who's into Palahniuk, probably), but ... it simply doesn't work for everyone and every story, likely not even the majority of either. And when I hit the anecdote about a girl in his writing class …

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