Product Description

Writing a book requires a focus, a sense of knowing and trusting in yourself and your work. And it requires an unflinching commitment to staying the course. Chapter After Chapter shows you how to build on your good writing habits, accrue and recognize tiny successes, and turn your dedication to the craft into the book you always knew you could write if you could just stay with it.

Heather Sellers, author of Page After Page, draws on her first-hand experience as a novelist, poet, memoirist, and children's book author to help you prepare for whatever roadblocks you might encounter while writing the book of your dreams. You'll discover how to celebrate the momentum of slow and steady, stay in love with your book project through soggy middles and long revisions, and embrace the nakedness that is creative expression.

And you'll realize you've got exactly what it takes write your book!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122321 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

From the Publisher
Every book is a lonely journey, but Chapter After Chapter provides the wisdom, inspiration, and wit needed to help writers go that difficult distance and not feel so very alone.
--N.M. Kelby, author of Whale Season and forthcoming Murder at the Bad Girl's Bar and Grill

Heather Sellers has written the Great Mother of all Wise Guides, an indispensable roadmap to authorship for both emerging and experienced writers. No need to clear a space on the bookshelf for Chapter After Chapter; writers will want this book in hand as they drive idea toward finished manuscript. Reading this, I lamented not owning a copy before embarking on my current project. With its pragmatic tips and helpful exercises designed to fortify against procrastination and keep me madly in love with my book, Chapter After Chapter would have saved me years of meandering off course.
--Lorraine Lopez, author of Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, Call Me Henri, and The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters (to be released by Warner Books in fall of 2007)

About the Author
Award-winning writer and professor Heather Sellers is the author of Page After Page, as well as Georgia Under Water, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, and the kids’ book Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure.

Customer Reviews

Mentor
303 Words

A Book Review by Ethel Louise Clark

Chapter After Chapter
By Heather Sellers
Published in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2007 by Writer's Digest Books, First Edition


Heather Sellers provides us with the necessary tools for writing that novel we've been dreaming about. The book is woven together in three segments. Part one helps you how to prepare yourself for the duration. Part two gives you the perseverance, strength-building and the nitty-gritty of actual writing. Part three moves you to complete that manuscript.

The author shares with her reading audience how her own personal experiences helped her to overcome her writing insecurities and fears.Her information and wisdom are priceless.

Each chapter ends with a skilled writing exercise designed to help the writer break through those dreaded blocks and to sever the procrastination habit. I admit to not having done every single exercise. Detailed and lengthy are not my favorite adjectives.

The clarity and insight the author presents absorbs the reader into moving on to the next chapter with eagerness and passion. Heather Sellers definitely leaves a positive influence on putting pencil to paper and the creativity back into writing. She showed me how to arrange my life so as to write more and be persistent about sticking to it.

It was an easy read for me prompted by the author's previous book titled Page After Page, equally enticing. The author sends a clear message that you can write with an occasional nudge in the right direction.

I recommend Chapter After Chapter to all who want to learn to write and to those who love to write. I keep this wonderful creation next to my laptop for inspiration's sake. It is purely a mentor that I pick up habitually when a question about the creating process arises. I need only one book to guide me....Chapter After Chapter.

Will buy her other book as well
This book is not perfect. There are suggestions that I think are ridiculous, like you must read 100 books in your chosen genre before starting to write your own novel. Yes, read the books, but get writing as well. Yet, the point is well taken, if a bit skewed. Yes, you should be well read, in your chosen genre and in others as well, if you want to have an original voice.

This book is not perfect, but there are enough gems, that I want to finish the book and buy her other book as well. It is clear that she is a writer who has spent many nights in the trenches, who loves writing and wants to encourage others to write. She, however, pulls no punches in telling you that you must be well equipped to make the commitment to writing, to make time, and do the work.

This will probably become a classic in its genre.

discovering that i've heard these ideas before
I tried reading this book but I found it to
be too cutesy. She also picks on people
that had a tragic childhood after a famous
writer comes to her class and tells a student
that if she didn't go through bad things as
a child, she couldn't be a writer. I disagreed
with this writer as well as Sellers who then
blames these types of writers for her lack
of success. I really hate it when writers
write books and then make their own writing
experiences as the absolute GOSPEL for other
would-be writers( i.e. not needing an agent to
get published, how much money you can expect to
make, which is different for her than most people
because she wrote a poetry book, etc.)
Although she does give good pointers on how to
overcome writer's block, I found much of the
same information in Victoria Nelson's On Writer's
Block, which she recommends in the back of her
Page after Page book. I found Nelson's information
to be more concise whereas Sellers was more general.

I gave her three stars for effort but if you are
serious about becoming unblocked then read Victoria
Nelson's On Writer's Block.