When
I first decided to write a book on writing (after blogging about the
subject for a year and a half), the decision was not a difficult one. I
had a vision of exactly what I wanted.
Strunk & White.
Elements of Style.
It’s not that I believed myself capable of equaling their (arguable)
classic work on grammar, style, and writing in general but rather I
wanted to produce a book that was small in stature, large in OOMPH. A
book one might keep next to the computer (or typewriter, for your
sadomasochists). In fact, I priced the paperback as low as the
distributor would allow (which means I make less on a physical paperback
than a digital copy), all because I honestly believe, of all books,
this is the one that deserves all the real highlight marks, dogears, and
other signs of heavy usage over the years.
You see, over the decades I attended (and led) quite a number of
writing workshops, attended courses, and handed out work to be critiqued
(with the telltale grimace of someone who doesn’t want to hear what he
or she knows they need to hear). But the
gemsI learned over
those years. I had to share them. I needed to share them. I believe
fervently that writers need to band together because, unlike other
products, ours is continually in demand—far more demand than only a few
select of us can provide. In other words:
There are enough readers for all talented writers (and even for some not-so-talented ones).
Books
are not like sofas or cars or television sets. People don’t buy just
one and hold on to it for 5-20 years. Some speedy readers I know read a
book a day. What’s the average? Book a week? The demand for books is
there—what we authors need are two things:
1) A hand-holding-hand path out of the jungle, to civilization, where the readers live
and
2) A product well worth their hard-earned money and time when we arrive there to present our work to them.
I work diligently at helping with #1. Now I wanted to share what I’d
learned through trials, hard knocks, painful red ink on the page, and
some damned fine writers over the years so that a fellow author might
sit with my book and use a few simple (call them what you will: rules,
techniques, processes, guidelines) and come out the other side with a
book at least twice as good as it was entering the makeover.
Thus
INK: Eight Rules To A Better Bookwas born.
Not of greed; not of pride; not of chance. INK was born because I was
destined to write it, and I promise you, those writers who’ve taken the
time to read it (one self-proclaimed slow reader devoured it in three
hours!) will learn a lifetime of lessons. And it’s a book you can read
over and over again. Highlighting, coming back to a section you love or
need or just wanted to get straight in your head.
Writing is a process, and like every other skilled profession in the
world, there are those to whom it comes naturally; there are great
writers and good writers and decent writers and, yes, horrible writers.
But I didn’t write INK for any one group. My theory is that no matter
where you fall on the spectrum of ability or talent, your prose can
always improve. None of us—nor non of “them”—is at the one hundred
percent, don’t need to fix a thing stage.
None is perfect.
Lastly, the cover is intentionally simplistic, because I believe in
the simplicity (and conversely, the POWER) of the eight rules. They
aren’t rocket science and every single writer out there in the world can
put them to use. I also have an absolute reason for using the hand
print in ink for the cover. It has come to represent the unique
signature of every writer on the planet. Each of us is different in some
way from the next. Like snowflakes.
Like hand prints.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
R.S. (Rob) Guthrie grew up in Iowa and Wyoming. He has been writing fiction, essays, short stories, and lyrics since college.
“
Black Beast: A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller”
marked Guthrie’s first major release and it heralded the first in a
series of Detective Bobby Macaulay (Bobby Mac) books. The second in the
series (
LOST) hit the Kindle shelves December of 2011.
Reckoningcloses out the trilogy. For now…
Guthrie’s “
Blood Land” is the first in the
James Pruett Mystery/Thriller
series and represents a project that is close to his heart: it is set
in a fictional town in the same county where he spent much of his
childhood and still visits. The sequel,
Money Land, hit the shelves Christmas Day, 2012.
Honor Land, the third in the bestselling series is due out in the Summer of 2013.
Guthrie lives in Colorado with his wife, Amy, three young Australian
Shepherds, and a Chihuahua who thinks she is a 40-pound Aussie! Pictured
is Elsa, the oldest, the Alpha, crazy adorable and every bit the diva
(and she knows it!). And yes, there is a Hero Dog book bursting to get
out that Guthrie plans to write concurrently with his third Pruett book.
Readers can catch up with what’s new with R.S. Guthrie at his official site,
http://www.rsguthrie.com , or discussions related to writing at his blog, Rob on Writing (
http://robonwriting.com).
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