Barbara Abercrombie

Or maybe you’ve been writing for years and are simply in a temporary funk and need to get unstuck. In any case, this is a why book.

No matter where we are in our writing, we need to be reminded, sometimes day by day, why we’re writing, why we ever wanted to do this in the first place, why it’s important and why we feel so antsy and crazy when we’re not writing.

and just happen to be in a rare group of calm, secure, and dignified individuals who simply want to write their story.

However, a little desperation and unsettledness certainly never hurt a writer; we all go through strange and painful periods in our lives and one of the reasons we read is to find out how other people, real or fictional, navigate the hard times.

At the end of the book there are fifty-two writing prompts, one for each week of the year, that can be used for writing either fiction or memoir and essays.

I like to think of this book as a party

writers who have some smart, funny, and inspirational takes on what it means to find the courage to write.

One year. Why not?

When I’m stuck and scared to death of writing the first line, I drive up to a cabin I have two hours north of Los Angeles

like you’re hiking over frozen tundra somewhere north of Canada.

Eventually I realize there’s nothing else to do up here but to open my laptop and start writing.