Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry

I bought this book for my own reading pleasure to supplement the textbook for my creative writing university class. Excellent.

I highly recommend this book for anyone from beginner to "intermediate" fiction writers and/or poets, or for teachers. It has excellent, well-planned advice about writing short stories and poetry. What I like best is that the tone is not didactic. Each chapter has "guest" writer inserts that provide various views on how writers go about working on their art and craft, and seem to have been chosen because they are clear, helpful, and creative, and most of all diverse. The advice and writing exercises are not "gimmicky" as they are in lots of books on creative writing, and the authors seem to truly focus on the learner, and being "user friendly." Unfortunately this is not true of some texts which use examples that are so sophisticated that the reader feels intimidated about "measuring up." The selections are also literary enough to be helpful in understanding some of the fine points about technique without being trendy or obtuse. It's nice to see that these authors put themselves in the background and focus on the needs of the audience, and eschew contemporary "hip" catch words like "gen x," "postmodernism" Kmart fiction, minimalism, metafiction, short shorts, and the like that just seem to confuse and confound the creative process

Mooring Against the Tide gives people wishing to improve their writing abilities a wonderful workshop style platform to work from. Read the layout above to see the areas which the book attacks. I found this to be one of the few "How to Write" books that I couldn't put down. I didn't think it was possible to grab a reader quite so well in an instructional book like that.The book takes student's writing and dissects it. It goes through step by step. First you read the student's story, then it is edited with side notes and such, and lastly the author gives us his final edited version. Mooring's authors then go on to talk about the piece and its improvements. It also covers poetry as shown above. I have nearly a shelf of "How to Write" books that are read part way through. When I'm writing, this one never leaves my side. Great book!