I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I like the author – I’ve enjoyed her acting and her range of online projects, as well as her memoir a few years back. I also read a lot of books about process – this one frames it as process related to “creativity” rather than writing, but it’s the same basic stuff. Despite that, though, I just think I’m not the target audience for this book. Meaning, one of my main disconnects from it was that a lot of its discussion and its exercises seemed pitched towards someone who is both 25 years younger than me and someone who is much earlier on in thinking about making stuff as part of life. And unfortunately, the writing just didn’t work for me a lot of the time, either. It is really, really invested in being quippy and quirky and funny, but it usually did so in a way that wasn’t for me. All of which is too bad, because underneath the writing that wasn’t a good fit and the demographic targeting that wasn’t a good fit, Day very clearly has thought a lot about her life of making things and has important insights to share. Reading this did make me want to sit down and have a conversation with her over coffee or beer and pick her brain about all of this stuff (and probably be far more charmed and amused by her quips in person than on the page). And, thankfully, my main reason for reading books about writing process (or creative process, or whatever you want to call it) is to stimulate self-reflection, and there were certainly places where this book did that. I can’t say all of the (perhaps too) many exercises in the book worked for me, and in fact later in the book I did only a fraction of them, but some definitely got my reflective gears churning. So, really, what more could I ask.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.