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Title: Not helpful
Review: I wanted to like this book. The ideas it explores are interesting, but in the end it disappoints. It is presented at least implicitly as self-help, but it offers no real help. A lot of metaphors (some quite striking) a moderately interesting account of the author's time at writing school at Iowa, all of it adding up to nothing in particular. I think the problem is the writer never breaks out of the jail cell of her own mind and her own ego. Other people in this book are not actual characters but subjects of anecdote, and for this reason they never fully come to life. Nor do the ideas discussed ever get past the stage of what it means to the writer. Not "the writer" in general, but the one writing this book.Two more practical books about writing I would recommend are Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel and On Becoming a Novelist by James Gardner.
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