Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s WaySpiritual Electricity:The Basic Principles Over the past few months, we’ve taken a deep dive into AI writing tools. Now we’re coming up for air and trying to reconnect with our human creative souls. What better book for this than Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way?  Published over thirty years ago, Cameron’s much...

In this episode, we’re finally putting the Hero’s Journey to rest and bidding farewell to Christopher Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey.” And by “putting to rest,” we mean cramming the entire second half of this doorstop of a book into one episode. Renee takes one for the team by distilling each chapter down to its least painful bits. Then we’ll zoom out to discuss what we actually found valuable in this tome and offer our candid recommendations on how to approach reading it.

For the second half, we’re pivoting to something that won’t collect dust on your shelf—our new mini-series on AI and its invasion of the writing world. Do chatbots mean the end of the craft of writing, or can we humans somehow incorporate the AI’s as tools to improve our stories? Today, we’re just examining how alarmingly far AI has advanced since our last tech episode two years ago (spoiler: it’s terrifying).

Remember, we have a Writers Process meetup every Wednesday. Check us out.

We’re on the last chapter of Judith Barrington’s book, Writing the Memoir, “Practical Advice on Critique Groups,” plus the dos and don’ts of giving and getting feedback. It’s practical and useful and everything we’ve come to expect from Barrington. But before we close the book on memoir, we give our final takes on the book along with what chapters we think are mores useful.

And then …. something new.

Our new book is Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. Written back in the late 90’s, this book brought the Hero’s Journey mainstream for scriptwriters, and also, as the subtitle promises, for writers. Before we jump into the book proper, we take a moment to consider its introductions (there’s two of them) and the promises they make. Get ready for the snark, but also an examination on the mythic structure plotting approach to your writing.

How do you tackle one of the most famous writing craft books, you take it “Bird by Bird.” That’s what we’ve done with Anne Lamott’s book over the past 12 episodes and in this final episode we cover her end of the class advice, along with how to avoid libel (not sure why that got placed there) and give our opinion about the book as a whole.

And then, because there’s always another writing craft book, we reveal what we’re reading next … Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir. Finally, we have a great discussion about memoir writing classes with one of Renee’s favorite memoir writing instructors, Joselin Linder.

It’s time for a new season and it’s time for a new book! We’re starting Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This is the writing process book that everyone has heard of, and, given that it’s funny and self-deprecating, it’s probably one most people have read. We’re looking forward to mining it for writing tips and seeing following them increases our own literary output.

Welcome to Words to Write by – a podcast where we discuss, chapter by chapter, those wonderful writing craft books purchased with the best of intentions but now gathering dust on the bookshelf.