This national bestseller from celebrated novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro is an intimate and eloquent companion to living a creative life. Through a blend of memoir, meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Shapiro offers her gift to writers everywhere: a guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course. In the ten years since the first edition, Still Writing has become a mainstay of creative writing classes as well as a lodestar for writers just starting out, and above all, an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

Praise

“A practical, wise, and inviting guide to [Shapiro’s] 20-year journey as an author and teacher.” —Elle

“Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro’s long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between.” —Jennifer Egan

“Writers need hope. Writers need help. Thank you, Dani Shapiro.” —Michael Cunningham

“Dani Shapiro has written a wise, pragmatic, and soulful field guide to the writing life. Still Writing is filled with honest words to not only live by but write toward. Shapiro has created a well-drawn map for the lost, the weary, and the found. I loved it.” —Terry Tempest Williams

Excerpt

Permission

If you’re waiting for the green light, the go-ahead, the reassuring wand to tap your shoulder and anoint you as a writer, you’d better pull out your thermos and folding chair, because you’re going to be waiting for a good long while.

Accountants go to business school, and when they graduate with their degrees, they don’t ask themselves whether they have permission to do people’s taxes. Lawyers pass the bar, medical students become doctors, academics become professors, all without considering whether or not they have a right to be going to work. But nothing and no one gives us permission to wake up and sit at home staring at a computer screen while everybody else sets their alarm clocks, puts on reasonable attire, and boards the train. No one is counting on us, or waiting for whatever we produce. People look at us funny, very possibly because we look funny, strange and out of sync with the rest of the world after spending our days alone in our bathrobes, talking only to our household pets, if at all.

I can’t imagine what my UPS delivery guy thinks when I crack open the door to sign for a package. There’s that weird lady again. My husband, who has been a successful journalist and screenwriter for most of his adult life, was in his forties before his father stopped asking him when he was going to get a real job.