The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life
By Priscilla Long
I really enjoyed Priscilla Long’s “Minding the Muse” — a slim yet potent handbook for creators, full of both insights and practical strategies on various parts of the creative process.
This book is at once more thorough and more focused, specifically about writing, but covering all sorts of parts of the process, from gathering words to seeing and observing to structuring story to crafting sentences to revising and publishing.
But if it’s like her other work, it’s not just a dry practical handbook, it also goes deep into the spiritual and poetic elements, and more besides; she packs over twenty years of teaching experience into this volume. One reviewer describes how Long includes “everything from lessons on productivity, grammar discussions, lessons on diction and syntax, and something I haven’t seen in many books: instructions on how to observe the world and turn what we experience into words.”
And I just discovered there’s a second edition coming out this year…could be a good excuse to finally pick this one up!