Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

Writing Past Dark charts the emotional side of the writer's life. It is a writing companion to reach for when you feel lost, and want to regain access to the memories, images, and ideas inside you that are the fuel of strong writing. Bonnie Friedman has experienced creative exhiliration, but she has also suffered the maddening estrangement that can make a writer question everything. She knows the loneliness of the writer and her book is a journey at once both exotic and nearby.

Friedman looks at the dilemmas a writer faces and shares the clues that can set you free. She explores envy, the ubiquitous writer's disease that turns you against your own work and your own self, and she offers advice on how to overcome it. She questions why we fall silent when we do, what persuades us to quit on a certain story or chapter, and how to regain faith in our work. Writing Past Dark illuminates other secret, difficult, and very common emotions. Probing our fascination with the taboo, she looks at the urge to write about family and friends - the desire to discover on paper the very things we have never been able to say out loud - even while we are reluctant to hurt loved ones. She describes how our need to be perfect can make us mute. And, looking at writing school, she discusses the search for a mentor, the cult of technique, the realization of how we learn to become artists, and how we learn to become ourselves on the page.

Personal, intimate, and thoughtful, Bonnie Friedman is a wise companion, also traveling through the night, sharing insights that can free you to keep writing, take risks, and experience the value of your work