Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers

Toddlers - and drunks - bang around hitting walls, tables, chairs, the floor, and other people, trying to find their legs. Writing fiction is a similar process. Sometimes it might take a while before the story gets some balance and moves forward. Sometimes the story takes off as if motor-driven, then crashes into something not foreseen or expected. Learning to be a writer is all about finding your legs, and doing your best to convince onlookers that you know what you're doing and where you're going.

In Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, acclaimed Southern story writer and novelist George Singleton serves up everything you ever need to know to become a real writer (meaning one who actually writes), in bite-sized aphorisms. It's Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil meets Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It's cough syrup that tastes like chocolate cake. In other words, don't expect to get better unless you get a good dose of it, maybe two.

Accompanied by more than fifty original full-color illustrations by novelist Daniel Wallace, these laugh-out-loud funny, candid, and surprisingly useful lessons will help you find your own writerly balance so you can continue to move forward.

Writers (and writing-instruction books) sometimes take themselves a little too seriously. All the affected gravitas is often a drag to read and usually a mask for shallow sentiment. Pep Talks, Warnings and Screeds is a one-of-a-kind approach to writing advice. With laugh-out-loud stories and aphorisms by George Singleton and whimsical illustrations by Daniel Wallace, this book of important lessons and cautionary advice for writers is not only easy to swallow but also enjoyable and satisfying--imagine cough medicine that tastes like chocolate cake. Writers will gain an understanding of writing and submission basics-- all with heart, humor, and a poetic palette that is distinctly, wonderfully southern.

Or, as the author says, This book is a cross between the aphorisms of Friedrich Nietzscheas Beyond Good and Evil (without the misogyny or racism) and Anne Lamottas Bird by Bird (without the monks, gurus, celebrities, and weird mysticism).