Looking For Help Setting the Page on Fire?
Looking For Help Setting the Page on Fire?
Steve O’Keefe’s book may be just what you need
Steve O’Keefe’s book may be just what you need
Book Review: Set the Page on Fire: Secrets of Successful Writers
(New World Library kindly sent me a review copy of this book, but the opinions in this review are mine.)
Steve O’Keefe was a successful article and content writer. He also taught prisoners and others writing. But his father was fond of telling him, “You should write a book.” Never mind about all the articles, news releases, and other content O’Keefe had written. When his father talked about being a writer, he meant writing a book.
After his father died in 2003, O’Keefe decided it was time to do what his father had encouraged for so long — write a book. And so he devised a plan. He’d spend summers traveling the country interviewing authors, then take the rest of the year to edit and upload those interviews to the internet from his home base in New Orleans. And, oh yeah, write a book based on them, too.
And then Hurricane Katrina hit. And suddenly the nomadic lifestyle became a way of life. Which is good news for writers everywhere because out of it came this book, which distills advice from hundreds of writer interviews and O’Keefe’s own experience.
One of my problems with writing books — and many non-fiction books in general — is that they take their own sweet time warming up. They tell us what they’re going to tell us later on in the book. Much later. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather spend my time actually writing than reading an author warming up to his subject.
But O’Keefe doesn’t waste your time. He gets right to it, beginning on page one with his list of the Top 10 Secrets of Successful Writing. My favorite is, “a thousand words before dawn,” because I’ve been doing this for years. I also love “schedule time at the keyboard,” wherein he points out that two hours a day at the computer equals a book a month.
In his chapter, Making Time to Write, O’Keefe offers one of my favorite quotes ever. In response to his complaint that he didn’t have enough time to write, a colleague sniped, “Quit wasting so much time sleeping.” Ha! (It really is time to deconstruct that old, tired myth of the manic writer who stays up all night working. Sleeping is good for you, people.)
And O’Keefe is also a man after my own heart, advising writers to write fast and get the words on the page without worrying about mechanics. “It’s easy to fix writing that has bad mechanics, but it’s very difficult to infuse ordinary writing with a voice that grabs the reader and a pace that doesn’t let go.” This comes only when you let the words rip. (And I would add a plea that you don’t skip the rewriting phase. It’s easy to fall in love with your first draft and think it perfect. It’s not. Trust me.)
Finally, O’Keefe offers a formula for a four-part pitch to interest editors, agents, potential clients, anybody. It’s a handy template to follow, and he and his students swear by it.
The book is under 150 pages long, which to me is a benefit. What usually happens when I read a writing book is that I get excited and I go to the page. And often I don’t return to reading the book. So I appreciate a book that is short and succinct, like this one.
You can order the book from Amazon here.
Charlotte Rains Dixon is the author of the novel Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior (Vagabondage Press, February 2013), and articles published in magazines such as Vogue Knitting, The Oregonian and Pology, to name only a few, and her short fiction has been published in Somerset Studios, The Trunk and the Santa Fe Writer’s Project. She earned her MFA in creative writing at Spalding University in 2003, and has been teaching and coaching writers ever since, both privately and as an adjunct professor at Middle Tennessee State University’s Write program. She’s been blogging about writing, creativity, and motivation at charlotterainsdixon.com since 2007. She is repped by Erin Niumata at FolioLiterary. Visit her website at charlotterainsdixon.com and her travel site at letsgowrite.com.
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