THE WRITER'S WRITER
Gary Provost

Excerpt from Introduction (first published in 1990 by Writer’s Digest Books):

Writing dreams do come true.

For many years I was the person who was always doing what you have just done, picking up books about writing technique, hoping they would help me get closer to that fantasy of being a published writer. I was a dreadful writer, I really was. But in the past fifteen years I have published five novels, five books for writers, a sports book, a thousand magazine articles, short stories and newspaper articles, two poems, and four true crime books, one of which was made into a movie. I have won the National Jewish Book Award without being Jewish, and I came close to being the new Ann Landers, without being female. In my twenties I couldn’t even get a word published. Now writing dreams come true for me every day.

They come true because I learned how to write well, and in this book I will tell you what I have learned about good writing. My teachers have been my own mistakes, occasional editors who have been kind enough to set me straight, and my students, several of whom have generously allowed me to publish excerpts from their work.

What you will learn here applies to your fiction and your nonfiction. There is nothing here that should be discarded by the writer who works exclusively in one form or the other. The best fiction writers have influenced the greatest journalists of the present, and they, in turn, have been influencing the new writers of fiction. Increasingly, the difference between nonfiction and fiction is one of content, not of form or technique.

There is only one quality that I ask you to bring to this book. Humility about your writing. You cannot succeed without it. You must have the humility to know that writing that looks clever to you might be boring, that something beautifully written might be unnecessary, that something very personal to you might be meaningless to distant readers. You must accept the fact that a trained editor might see in your work liabilities that you thought were assets. And you must be capable of erasing any sentence you have written, if informed and unprejudiced voices can lead you to the truth about it.

If you can do that, the battle is already won. Read the book. Do the exercises. Read the book again. When we are done you will have a greater understanding of what it is that makes writing work for the reader. Your writing dreams won’t come true the next morning. Nor will they come true the following week. But if you take these lessons to heart and keep plugging away, they will come true. You will succeed as a writer just as I have succeeded, not because this book will close the gap between you and your writing dreams, but because you will have learned how to close it.