[.ca] Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life (ISBN 1582971943)

For entertainment only - but what great fun!:
Any writer looking for deep words from the large (and highly respected) group of writers featured in "Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life" will come away disappointed. But for those writers who are looking for a laugh and a breezy escape featuring personal writing tales from the likes of William F. Buckley, Ed McBain, Danielle Steel, Julia Child, Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, this book fills the bill as well as anything out there. A handsome book with a clean layout, quality semigloss stock, and a good binding, the showpieces are the delightful Charles Schultz "Peanuts" strips featuring Snoopy in his hopeless Writer persona. Each one is funnier than the next, and as brought together in one place provide an overview of Snoopy's writing strips that I have not found in any other collection. (The strips span the latter half of the comic's run as Snoopy's Writer didn't show up until the Seventies.) Schultz skewers just about every genre of writing, nails the agonies and ecstasies of rejection and acceptance, and does more with "It was a dark and stormy night" than seems humanly possible. If you are a writer and can't laugh at Snoopy's pathetic talents, you need to get out of the profession! Nonwriters might find the author anecdotes just a distraction from the humor in the strips, but what a wonderful distraction. So sure, it fails to be a writer's workshop, sacrificing technical knowhow for mirth, but still, how can you lose? I can think of far worse ways for a writer to spend a few hours than reading this little piece of escapism. A three star book with a four star soul thanks to Schultz's keen eye and Snoopy's aplomb.

not a how-to book:
This is a fun book. It doesn't provide much practical advice on writing, but it does contend with the psychological hurdles of writing, from struggling to get words on the page to dealing with rejection and bad critics. The short essays by famous & successful writers helped me by providing a little perspective on how various writers work. I liked the comic strip and short essay format. You could read it cover to cover, but you can just as easily put it down between essays and actually get some writing done. I checked it out of the library, but I think it would make a great gift.

Methinks I spotted a mistake:
On page 153, in an effort to encourage writers who might be dismayed by rejection slips, Jack Canfield writes, "Margaret Mitchell's classic GONE WITH THE WIND was turned down by more than twenty five publishers." To my knowledge, this is completely untrue. The story I've heard (from more than one source) goes something like this: Margaret Mitchell wrote the book while recovering from a leg injury. She considered writing as simply a hobby, and she wasn't even thinking of publishing the book. She figured she was only writing it for her and her husband. But then one day a publisher came to Atlanta and some of Margaret's friends told him that she was working on a book. Margaret had once worked for a brief period on the local newspaper and she had some connections in the city. The publisher was eager to see the manuscript, but Margaret didn't have much confidence in it and she refused to show it to him. But he worked on her and finally wore her down. She showed up at the train station just before he was leaving with a pile of envelopes that contained different portions of the novel, all out of order. The book was hardly a rough draft at this stage, but the publisher liked what he read and he signed the book and Margaret went to work cleaning it up and polishing it into the book we know today. I've never heard anything about these other twenty five publishers. People should check their facts before they print things in a twenty dollar book.

It was a dark and stormy review...:
"Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life" is a tribute to Charles Schulz, the late great creator of the Peanuts comic strip and its famous beagle-with-a-typewriter, Snoopy. The book is filled with various strips lampooning all sorts of aspects of writing, and tiny snippets of advice from famous authors. The strips in this book are so funny that I had to share many of them with my husband as I read. Particularly all the ones that have within them some variation of the line: "It was a dark and stormy night." Snoopy seemed fixated on that idea, unable to get past it to anything more original than "it was a dark and stormy noon," or perhaps, "he was a dark and stormy knight." And in between all of these stormy nights we get to see Snoopy's clashes with editors and publishers of all kinds: "Dear Contributor, We are returning your dumb story. Note that we have not included our return address. We have moved to a new office, and we don't want you to know where we are." Ouch! All writers can identify with some part of the poor beagle's struggles for fame, recognition, and a fifty thousand dollar check! I was a bit surprised to find out just how short most of these little essays are--a few paragraphs, generally. On the other hand, it meant there was more room for comic strips, so how can I complain? This book isn't meant to be an exhaustive textbook or guide to the writing life. It's a joyful riff on the pain, excitement, and perspiration that is writing. You're bound to find something in here by a writer you love, and it's neat just to see what these preeminent folks have to say. Each essay is preceded by a related comic strip, and many of the essays address Snoopy or one of his friends directly, or mention poor Snoopy's latest plight--it's an endearing conceit. Each is then followed by several more strips just to keep us laughing. This is a wonderful coffee table book. It's a great gift for your favorite struggling, would-be, or even successful writer. All of us can relate to Snoopy's trials and tribulations. All of us can enjoy seeing these brief words of wisdom from such accomplished authors. And all of us could use a good laugh at ourselves and the "hardships" we endure in the writing life!

For Snoopy fans only:
Other books have tried this same concept and succeeded more: Naomi Epel's "Writers Dreaming," "The Best Writing on Writing" edited by Jack Heffron, the essays in the annual "Writer's Handbook," or even Frederick Busch's "Letters to a Fiction Writer." The twist here is the Snoopy comics - and there are many in this book. Snoopy, the Literary Ace, is a favorite of mine, but I limited the stars due to the lack of substance in the text, particularly for the price! I read it twice, and the book is so unfocused, minimalistic, and generic in its approach as to be useless. The writers represent everything from sci-fi to self-help yet there is suprisingly little writing advice or even reminiscences an aspiring writer might relate to or learn from. It's more like snippets collected at a literary cocktail party. For HUMOR about writing, I'd recommend this book. For anything more meaty, I'd recommend the books previously mentioned.