Review of 'Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Perhaps a little unfair of me to review and rate without finishing, but I don't see the point in forcing myself on when at page ten I'm wishing I were done.
I would never have thought to pick up a book on writing by Chuck Palahniuk because we're such very different people with very different styles, but there was a glowing review on Writer Unboxed so I thought I'd give him a shot. The very beginning was compelling, but when I got to "Textures", I hit a speed bump.
The idea of mixing narration, second-person instruction, and onomatopoeia is great advice for a specific kind of voice (to be fair, the authorial voice of someone who's into Palahniuk, probably), but ... it simply doesn't work for everyone and every story, likely not even the majority of either. And when I hit the anecdote about a girl in his writing class …
Perhaps a little unfair of me to review and rate without finishing, but I don't see the point in forcing myself on when at page ten I'm wishing I were done.
I would never have thought to pick up a book on writing by Chuck Palahniuk because we're such very different people with very different styles, but there was a glowing review on Writer Unboxed so I thought I'd give him a shot. The very beginning was compelling, but when I got to "Textures", I hit a speed bump.
The idea of mixing narration, second-person instruction, and onomatopoeia is great advice for a specific kind of voice (to be fair, the authorial voice of someone who's into Palahniuk, probably), but ... it simply doesn't work for everyone and every story, likely not even the majority of either. And when I hit the anecdote about a girl in his writing class who noted that men use sound effects when relating stories and women don't, with his response effectively, "men are better storytellers because of it," I realized that this just wasn't the book for me. There may be gems here and there in the pages that can be useful to any writer, but I have many other things to read and enjoy.