Customer Reviews

Crafting The Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction

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Crafting the Personal Essay will make a terrific textbook for writing students, but I'm a fiftysomething writer who has made his living in journalism, publishing, and teaching and I found it interesting and inspiring. It makes me want to try writing different types of essays than I've attempted and to develop new skills, to grow.

Dinty Moore discusses a wide range of essays, including: contemplative, memoir, nature, lyric, spiritual, gastronomical, humorous, and travel. To show how they work, he dissects some, inserting commentary in places; this includes some of his own work, and throughout the book he includes parts of an essay he's currently writing to show his thinking and decisions as he tries to practice what he's preaching. This is a great idea--it really makes the book lively and engaging.

The second part of Crafting the Personal Essay deals with practical writing issues, such as forging a regular routine, blogging, overcoming writers block, getting useful feedback from other writers, effective revising, and persevering through life's vagaries. I'll return to this section periodically, as I will to Moore's reading recommendations.

I've been wanting to spend national novel writing month doing something that wasn't a novel because I have never seen myself as a novelist. So I grabbed this book and I am super happy I did. It offers tons of great information and tons of tips. It explains what types of essays there are and just how to write them and how they help you write your essay. I couldn't put it down and hope to reread it all over again in another day or two and really get to work on writing some great personal essays.

PS. The cute rabbit is just the icing on the cake of this great book.

Mr. Moore is undoubtedly an excellent teacher and writer, and this is a fine book on how to develop and write essays. It's meant to get you started. And that's how we all learn to write, by writing and rewriting. The only fault I can find with his book is, he tries to cover too much with too little. If you have the patience to work trough all the prompts and exercises, You'll have a good foundation.

This is a really great book to get you started writing (again, in my case). It's informal, practical without being boring or stifling, and has some really fertile "prompts." The most important takeaway from the book is "Remember the Reader," which is something we all need to be reminded of. I really appreciated working my way through these exercises by myself, building confidence and expertise before putting my writing out there for criticism, in a writing class or for friends and family and even, eventually, maybe for publication. Great job, Mr. Moore!

This guide was chock full of filling facts that nourished my writing like a big bowl of beef stew.