Write Like the Masters

My new book on writing, Write Like the Masters: Emulating the Best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger and Others, will be published by Writer's Digest Books in 2009.

So many people today are banging their brains out against their keyboards asking themselves, “Why can’t I write like the greats?” when the simple answer is that you can. First, though, you need to come to grips with the fact that the greats were educated quite differently from you and me. Unfortunately, during the past eighty or so years writers have not received instruction in a vital training method that their predecessors routinely employed to improve their skills. Indeed, this neglected technique is one of the most important training methods ever developed for writers, a technique which was used with spectacular results for two thousand years but which was suddenly dropped from the curriculum. Almost every great writer studied these methods, but you were probably denied access to them by a recent change in our educational system. Chances are that when you discover this lost technique, and practice this forgotten art, the experience will have an explosive impact upon your writing and will do for you what it did for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, T.S. Eliot and countless others, infusing new life into your work and jump-starting your creative career.