Starting from Scratch - by Rita Mae Brown (Paperback)

About the Book

From the outspoken and irreverent multi-million-copy bestselling author, here is the first trade paperpack publication of Brown's writing manual. Unlike most writers' guides, hers has as much to do with how writers live as with mastering the tools of their trade.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Rubyfruit Jungle and Bingo, here is a writers' manual as provocative, frank, and funny as her fiction.

Unlike most writers' guides, this one had as much to do with how writers live as with mastering the tools of their trade. Rita Mae Brown begins with a very personal account of her own career, from her days as a young poet who had written a novel no publisher wanted to take a chance on, right up to her recent adventures as a Hollywood screenwriter. In a sassy style that makes her outspoken advice as entertaining as it is useful, she provides straight talk about paying the rent while maintaining the energy to write; and dealing with agents, publishers, critics, and the publicity circus; about pursuing journalisim, academia, or screen-writing; and about rejecting the Hemingway myth of the hard-living, hard-drinking genius.

In addition Brown, a former teacher or writing, offers a serious examination of the writer's tool--language, plotting, characters, symbolism--plus exercises to sharpen the ear for dialogue, and a fascinating, annoted reading list of important works from the seventh century to the late twentieth.

Review Quotes

"Funny enough in places to make you laugh aloud but honest enough to weed out the weak of heart who think writing is made by muses rather than writers' hard work."--Columbus Sunday Dispatch

"A writer's manual that reads like a cross between Writers Digest and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind."--The Washington Post.

About the Author

Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of the Sneaky Pie Brown series; the Sister Jane series; A Nose for Justice and Murder Unleashed; Rubyfruit Jungle; In Her Day; and Six of One, as well as several other novels. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia.