Help! For Writers is divided into a seven-step writing process. Clark provides multiple solutions to common writing problems such as writer’s block, time management, procrastination, information overload, finding your story, wrestling with editing, and learning from criticism. Like all of Clark’s other books on craft, short chapters, paragraphs, and key takeaway bullet points are used to provide the reader with an accessible structure and a clean focal space in which to assimilate ideas and solutions. This book is for writers who have just started their writing journey and are encountering common writing hurdles and hitches.
A Sample of Lessons
- Ideas can be found anywhere: in a bagel store or restaurant, on a visit to a bookshop, on an alternative route to work or school, on a billboard, poster or graffiti, in the daily news headlines, in unfamiliar topics, in conversations and observations, or with a person whose job interest you.
- Organise your work habits: clean the clutter, index your notebooks, structure your project, write down your mission, list and order your tasks, keep files in order, and save some string (unused but useful material) for future projects.
- To overcome writer’s block, lower your standards at the start of the process and raise them later. And, if you can’t find the beginning, write the end first.
About Roy Peter Clark
Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar and vice president at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies (a well-known Journalism school and research organisation in Florida). Clark has published seven books on the writing craft, as well as authoring and editing several books on Journalism. Having taught writing for more than thirty years to students and organisations, he is often referred to as ‘America’s favourite Writing Coach’.
His first book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, was published in 2006 (another five writing tools were added to a tenth-anniversary edition in 2016). His other books on the craft of writing include The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English; Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces; How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times; Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser; The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing; and Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing.
