Still Writing

The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

By: Dani Shapiro

Narrated by: Dani Shapiro

"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)

From Dani Shapiro, best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers - and anyone with an artistic temperament - will find inspiration and comfort here. Offering lessons learned over 20 years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.

©2013 Dani Shapiro (P)2020 Random House Audio

Reading her book, the author assumes an off-putting "priestess voice."

Some good advice, interwoven with way too much personal story.
And reading her book in this Audible version, the author assumed an off-putting "priestess voice."

Practical, heartfelt encouragement for the writing life

This book is a collection of short essays focused on various aspects of the experience of being a creative writer, from a celebrated novelist and memoirist. She generously takes us inside her daily writing process, her thoughts about writing, advice on how to approach and capture memory, the emotional ups and downs of writing, and how all of this is interwoven with daily family life. If you are trying to write, this book will help you to understand why it is so challenging and how to make it easier and more rewarding. It is also a love letter to creative self expression and to practitioners of the writing craft. Meditative, candid, grounded, and inspiring. Highly recommend.

Phenomenal book on writing

Great book that cuts to the heart of why we write and how to improve our craft.

Excellent account of the writing life

An inspirational account of the writing life, and a useful guide for any aspiring writer. Dani Shapiro is a writer I’d like to meet in a coffeeshop, and talk more about what she wrote, but I’d probably be a bit awestruck. No matter, she’s not full of herself. She wants to help us. Fail better, friends. Recommended for any aspiring writer, especially the Audible version, narrated by Dani herself.

Just What I Needed

Your book was supportive and encouraging for those of us who haven’t yet had the courage to step out as writers. I’m someone who has read few books in my life until I found audible three years ago. Your book is one of my favorites and will be shared with my writer-want-to-be friends. I have joined a small group of individuals who are sharing our secret desires to write. I personally identified with many of your descriptions of those of us who have the inner yearning to make peace with ourselves by putting words on paper (or creating digital text). I plan to listen to your book again…and maybe even a third time!

A solid memoir about doing the work

Dani Shapiro gives it to us straight: do the work, maintain good habits and consistency, get out of your own way, and don’t fall in love with your own work. She’s just the person to write this.

Wonderful, from her heart with kindness

Wonderfully written, interesting, wise, and informative. I will restart this at the beginning and listen again. There is plenty here and I want to hear all this again.

Inspiring but dark, better to read than listen

This book has a lot of insightful advice both from her and from other writers. I ended up bookmarking and sharing some of my favorites. I also found the sections about the process of writing and the discipline needed very helpful and inspiring. But it was also a depressing story in places and hard to get through. She goes into her terrible childhood with her selfish, narcissistic mother and depressed father enough to call this a memoir as much as a book about writing. At times, the tone was deeply cynical. It may be the narrator's take on the author's words - it's hard to say whether the author's own voice would sound so depleted, even snarky. I'd recommend reading it rather than listening.

It's a Hard-Knock Life...

My dog-eared paperback copy of this book sits on a table next to my bed - it's always a great go-to read before I fall asleep. Little bite-size chapters that contain nuggets of creative tricks and practical ways to keep you focused and in the zone when you are trying to write – an elusive endeavor, which Dani warns, is not for the faint of heart. Like most creative pursuits: acting • dancing • music • art • writing - your soul is alive with possibility and you can't imagine doing anything else.

I'm very grateful Dani decided to record this and her first memoir, SLOW MOTION, for Audible during the Pandemic. As I listen to them, I am re-visiting her written words - but I am also LISTENING to HER as she narrates her own words and personal stories. She has been at this practice for a long time now and her advice comes with an EDGE. A protective EDGE. A warning EDGE. A knowing EDGE. An EDGE because her life has gifted her with words she has been able to splice together into a verbal reckoning. Writers beware. The EDGE of someone who now creatively thrives in the silence of the country – and who could not have known at the time she wrote STILL WRITING (but does have that perspective as she reads her book) that literary notoriety would propel her into the spotlight in 2019 – when her memoir, INHERITANCE, became a New York Times Bestseller and inspired the hit podcast, FAMILY SECRETS and sent Ancestry.com stock through the roof!

Some of us are social hermits who enjoy the solitude that allows us to think, thrive, and create - and yet, many of us also need to come out of isolation and come up for air to find, as she recently posted on Instagram, "pockets of joy," whenever we can. I'm a huge fan of Dani's work and there are great life lessons here for staying present, noticing your surroundings, adjusting to the discomfort of creative isolation – and knowing that "pockets of joy" can be found in the creation process if we can just manage to center ourselves for the courageous discipline it takes to mine the veins of our imagination.

Beautiful, useful and encouraging

I loved this book - particularly the meditations - but then come to think of it- the whole thing is a meditation