Starting from Scratch [Paperback]

Rita Mae Brown (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 1, 1989

From the best-selling 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 pursuingj  ournalisim, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Focusing on the wonders of the English language, "Brown here gives nonwriters and writers alike a book to enjoy quite apart from its instructional value," stated PW . " The tone is stern but empathetic, spiced by the author's sassy wit and full of information on the writer's craft."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

While Brown offers sound practical advice for fiction writers, her witty colloquial style makes this manual more entertaining than others. Brown is less concerned with showing writers how to break into the market than with their survivalphysical, spiritual, and creativewhile trying to become published. Thus she instructs the reader not just in matters of craft but how to get enough to eat and sleep while working the "paying job." Suggested writing exercises, an annotated reading list, and a plan for a model writer's school all betray Brown's seriousness about the entreprise of literary production, making this useful for students of writing and literature and of interest to those curious about Brown's own career. Mollie Brodsky, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reissue edition (March 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055334630X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553346305
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #999,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of the Sister Jane novels-Outfoxed, Hotspur, Full Cry, The Hunt Ball, The Hounds and the Fury, The Tell-Tale Horse, and Hounded to Death-as well as the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries and Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, Six of One, and The Sand Castle, among many others. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good beginning place for the beginning writer. December 10, 1995

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This is an excellent writer's manual in many ways--I particularly enjoyed the emphasis on reading classics for "what works," the reasoning behind why a writer should know Latin, among others--even while it is totally inappropriate in others--things such as the unrealistic expectations based on Brown's own successes and her failure to understand genres, especially science fiction, fantasy and mystery. Still, the annotated reading list in the back is amazing for the simple fact that you have a hard time imagining that one person could read all of it, and yet it challenges you to give it a go.

(This "review" originally appeared in First Impressions Installment One [http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html].)

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Read Part III June 1, 2007

By Tina L. Jens

Format:Paperback

The author comes across as arrogant and condescending most of the time. I'd recommend skipping Parts I and II altogether, where she brags about herself then lays down all sorts of "musts" if you want to be a "real" writer. Writers have an amazing talent for procrastinating: I must clean the entire house-, I must paint the bedroom-, I must find a new job before I can start writing. Brown's "Must study Latin first" rule discussed by others above strikes me as a colossal example for this. I'm sure studying Latin is one of many effective ways to improve your craft, but to insist writers should not even put pen to paper until those two years of study are complete seems the height of lunacy.

Authors interested in writing mystery, fantasy, horror, SF, etc, will likely be put off by her repeated declaration that genre fiction is on the far edges of the distant suburbs of fiction, and none of her rules apply to it because it isn't real writing.

Part IV - a whip around of the peculiarities of writing different forms and in different media (television and film scripts, magazine articles, plays, etc - is of minor interest, short stories are blown off altogether.

Part V, her curriculum for a writers conservatory, would be better shared with an academic journal.

Part VI, her 30+ page reading list of critical works of fiction through the ages, starting in 665 AD, feels like it's pulled from a doctoral dissertation.

It's an interesting list, and contains many excellent works of genre: The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales (Modern Library Classics), The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Dracula (Signet Classics), the poems of Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Modern Library Classics), Riders of the Purple Sage (Leisure Historical Fiction), Tarzan of the Apes_, Agatha Christie's Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot Mystery, The Thin Man, and many others, rather belies her claim that genre fiction isn't worthy of anyone's time. Reading it in chronological order, as she insists must be done, would likely show some interesting developments in the field over time, but again, that strikes me as a doctoral dissertation requirement. There is value in reading some or all of these books, in whatever order the reader prefers.

If I were to recommend this book to anyone, it would be for Part III: The Work, where Brown focuses on language. There is much that is interesting here, especially the section where she explores vocabulary and the difference in intent and power between synonyms that derived from Old English/Anglo-Saxon (more powerful, language of the common people) versus Latin/French (more formal, language of the rulers and rich).

For example: woman vs female, lonely vs solitary, help vs aid, feed vs nourish.

The section on verbs, and the power of the passive voice when used *appropriately* was quite interesting.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What? You don't have this book? August 13, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Starting From Scratch will have you laughing and crying your way to the end. This is how it really is; from publishers to editors to rejections to how to pay the rent. Rita Mae Brown writes one of the best books on the writing life I've ever come across.