Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers [Paperback]

Susan Shaughnessy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0062507583 | ISBN-13: 978-0062507587 | Publication Date: March 19, 1993 | Edition: 1st

A daily motivator for people who write--and for all those who long to write--providing an insistent wake-up call for the creative urge, with insights on how to work against resistance, live with the loneliness, develop discipline, and dare to take deeper risks in their work.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For Walking on Alligators Susan Shaughnessy culled quotations from nearly 200 writers and other creative people--Ethan Canin, Art Spiegelman, Robin Williams, and Camille Paglia among them--that can help jumpstart the creative process. Each quotation leads to a short meditation on its subject, which in turn leads to a kind of vow the reader can internalize and act upon: "Today, I'll look over the key setbacks of my life. Are some ready to contribute comic color to my writing?"; "Today, I'll take a look at the high road. I will write a little better and a little differently. I will stretch." These tender morsels are best taken like vitamins: one a day. They will encourage, inspire, amuse, and provoke, but mostly they will make you start writing. After all, warns Shaughnessy in the introduction, "The writing you don't do today is lost forever."

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (March 19, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062507583
• ISBN-13: 978-0062507587
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #669,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good resource to keep writers writing daily....., October 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers (Paperback)

It's been awhile since I read excerpts from this book, but the general message of the book remains with me...one sign of an effective book. It's the kind of book you keep on your desk and pick up when you need that kick in the pants to get back to writing. The author understands and says just the 'write' thing! Buy one for yourself, and for a friend who keeps wistfully saying, "I really want to get serious about writing someday...."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mediations for Todays Writers, December 7, 2000

By 

Misty Miller a student of Adrian College (Adrian, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers (Paperback)

For any writer, they will be faced some time in their writing life where they will be stumped. I believe this book is a book to help writers of today. If you are going to sit down and write for today, and need some inspiration pick up this book. Opening this book, you come to a page where there are two critiques. One that stuck out the most to me was one that summarized this book in just a paragraph. "Many writers thirst to know what other writers have to say about what they do, and how they do it...I find that suggestions and ideas from this book float back to me at odd times, like when I'm picking off the anchovies at the pizza restaurant, and I think, yes, I could try that," Adair Lara said. Susan has said that writers in this book are here to make a path for you. Agreeing with her, I feel that this book is to kick some rocks out of the way. Each page gives a message from a writer, a little story and a mediation to follow. Every mediation is appropriate in getting the point across to today's writers. This book is filled with many extrodianary writers helping you pave the path to your life as a writer. Ending, I leave you with, "You are ready to begin your life as a writer, write today, the curtain is up."

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing with Alligators, March 29, 2001

By 

Michael Dolan (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers (Paperback)

Susan Shaughnessy's "Walking On Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers" (HarperCollins; paperback; 203 pp.), is a hard-edged gem of a book that cuts to the often-irritated quick of the writing life.

Via her dually-delivered doses of other people's observations -- mots both juste and justified, whether from familiar figures or unexpected sources -- and her own pithy commentary, the willy and witty Shaughnessy again and again lays a prickly grid of reality over the nebulous field of endeavor in which I toil, rendering it in clearer focus.

I've been working at the word trade for nearly 30 years as reporter, feature writer, and documentary filmmaker. I punched through the first 20 of those years without benefit of access to "Alligators." If I'd been able to avail myself earlier of the insights codified by Shaughnessy in her 1993 volume, I'd have been a wiser and perhaps better writer at a younger age. I'd certainly have avoided or at least short-circuited many of the soul-grinding, spirit-stifling, energy-draining habits of mind and contractual entanglements that dot the terrain of freelance writing like so many plastic anti-personnel mines.

Last fall, while teaching a Smithsonian Associates course on feature writing, I held up my copy of "Walking On Alligators" and told my students, "Get a copy of this book and read it. Even if you don't go on to become a writer, you'll be a better person for having read it." I say the same thing now to you.