Writing for Your Life: Discovering the Story of Your Life's Journey (Paperback)

by Deena Metzger (Author) "There was a little girl who, when she was three years old, wrote, or rather told, her first poem: Tree it doesn't grow in water,..." (more)
Key Phrases: bread woman, guide meditation, smaller story, Barbara Myerhoff, Pablo Neruda, Sleeping Beauty (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Writing for Your Life is an inspiring companion for any writer, professional or personal, who sees writing as a spiritual act. Early chapters on creativity and story would appeal to anyone interested in breaking through self-imposed boundaries, by encouraging the writer to "set yourself the task to write not only what you know but more especially what you don't know." We've all heard this before, but Deena Metzger (A Sabbath Among the Ruins) provides such resonant anecdotes and enticing exercises that it begins to seem not only doable but fun. "Even when writing about ourselves or an event that we know well," she says, "we sometimes find that the story ... is taking a direction we never expected. As it is always possible to come back to the known, it is politic, under these circumstances, to see where the story wants to go." Later chapters help writers access their inner worlds through meditation, spirit guides, mythology, tarot cards, the muse, visions, nature, and dreams. To follow Metzger's book closely requires a great deal of hard but rewarding, work. "Maintaining a spiritual practice is an ordeal like climbing a mountain," Metzger warns, "and it demands the same of us: commitment, discipline, endurance, focus, and awareness. There at the top is the sky and, perhaps, the large vision, but ultimately the meaning is in the climbing." --Jane Steinberg

From Library Journal
Poet, novelist ( What Dinah Thought, LJ 8/89), teacher, and therapist, Metzger presents unique writing exercises geared to liberate one's creativity from the rational mind. She progresses from a series of questions producing self-knowledge to others that result in stories and novels. Metzger is most engaging when she is offering concrete advice and examples from her friends' and students' writings instead of dispensing mystic philosophy. She lost this reviewer in Part 3, where she instructs the reader to meditate in order "to contact the wisest part of yourself and allow it to coalesce into a mythic or historic figure " to serve as an inner guide. However, all readers of this self-help book should be able to find some method here that best allows them to unlock their suppressed imaginations and write more freely.
- Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Manassas
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (November 20, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062506129
• ISBN-13: 978-0062506122
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #266,138 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This seven-novel writer's bible for getting off the dime, December 3, 1997

By A Customer

Metzger does the best job I've seen on jump-starting your creativity, and tying your writing into archetypes. There's lots for the reader who wants to think of writing as a spiritual exercise. BUT for me, by far, its great gift is pragmatic. Between books, or when I feel stuck, or at the beginning of a revision, I take out "On Story" and work through all her suggestions as if it were the first time. I always come up with something new and deeper relevant to THIS story--or I come up with a new story entirely. If you are ready to get past Natalie Goldberg to the goods, here's the book. It helped me tremendously with my last novel.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware - read this book and you may start writing your own!, July 9, 1996

By A Customer

Banish writer's block forever with Deena Metzger's Writing for Your Life. This boldly titled book is packed with inspirational material for the writer and creative writing teacher.There are many, many books on the market promising to unleash the imaginations of beginning writers - Metzger's actually delivers the goods. Her writing exercises confront, challenge and provoke. They are tickets to the most exciting journey of your life - an exploration of the human heart. If a book could turn a person into a writer, this is the book. Of course, just reading cannot do that trick. Metzger, however, makes the idea of writing so exciting that the blank page no longer intimidates but invites. If I were shipwrecked, I would take Writing for Your Life, reams and reams of paper, enough pens for a lifetime and M F K Fisher's The Art of Eating - but that's another story....

5.0 out of 5 stars A gift for any writer who wants to go deeper, February 3, 2009

By	Joel Friedlander "JFBookman" (San Rafael, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Deena Metzger's book is generous, spiritual, pragmatic and inspiring. Her exercises and prompts may lead you to deep areas within yourself that are surprising and she is a constant, understanding guide. You won't be disappointed.