Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life - Hardcover

"A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro's] 20-year journey as an author and teacher."--Elle "Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro's long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between."--Jennifer Egan "Writers need hope. Writers need help. Thank you, Dani Shapiro." --Michael Cunningham "Dani Shapiro has written a wise, pragmatic, and soulful field guide to the writing life. Still Writing is filled with honest words to not only live by but write toward. Shapiro has created a well-drawn map for the lost, the weary, and the found. I loved it." --Terry Tempest Williams "One of those rare books that is both beautiful and useful. Still Writing is an exploration of the writing life, lit up by Shapiro's luminous voice."--Susan Orlean "A thoughtful examination of [Shapiro's] life and the creative process that has defined it....Cleareyed, honest and grounded."--Kirkus Reviews

"Everything I know about life, I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write." From the best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate and eloquent companion to living a creative life. Through a blend of deeply personal stories about what formed her as a writer, tales from other authors, and a searching look at her own creative process, Shapiro offers her gift to writers everywhere: an elegant guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course. "The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks." Writers--and anyone with an artistic temperament--will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro brings her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers. Like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and Stephen King's On Writing, Dani Shapiro's Still Writing is a lodestar for aspiring scribes and an eloquent memoir of the writing life.