READ THIS FIRST OR WE'LL
SHOOT THE DOG…

Funny thing. I write a fair number of introductions to anthologies and collections, and I often begin by urging the reader to skip my prefatory remarks. "The material needs no introduction," I say, "so why are you wasting your time with this? I have no choice, I'm getting paid for this, but you can skip to the good part."

Don't you dare skip this!

I wrote Write For Your Life in the summer of 1985, shortly after my wife and I moved from New York City to Fort Myers Beach, Florida. For a couple of years Lynne and I had been dashing around the country to present a seminar for writers, one which addressed the inner game of writing. We could have called it that—The Inner Game of Writing—or we could have called it Developing the Writer Within, but what we called it was Write For Your Life.

(And what a stroke of genius that turned out to be. Several times we called hotels to book space for the seminars, only to be turned down by folks who thought we were saying Right For Your Life, and that we had something to do with the abortion controversy.)

The seminar was remarkably effective, but its audience was going to be limited. I wanted to make its content available to people who would never be able to attend it. So I took two weeks off and put it in book form, thinking that the volume would serve three purposes: it would help potential attendees to decide whether to take the seminar, while giving those who did attend something to take home with them and at the same time constituting a home seminar for everybody else.

I never even considered taking Write For Your Life to a commercial publisher. I knew I wanted to self-publish it, for two compelling reasons. First, I didn't want to wait a year or more for finished books—I wanted them in a hurry. Secondly, I'd always had fantasies of self-publication—I think most writers do, at one time or another—and figured this book was the perfect candidate. Its potential audience was one I could most effectively reach through our seminar advertising.

The experience was a happy one. I had books in hand by the end of the year, and essentially sold out our 5,000–copy first printing over the next couple of years. I priced the book too low—the cover price was $10, and it should have been at least $15 and probably $20, given the economics of the mail-order business—and I don't know that we made money on it, since it's hard to know how to calculate the advertising costs. But I had fun, and that was the point. (It generally is.)

Within two years, Lynne and I were out of the seminar business. I know there's a way to make a profit doing seminars, but I swear we couldn't find it. By the time we finished paying for plane tickets and hotel space and advertising, we were lucky to break even—and the amount of time and energy expended was incalculable. That was okay as long as we were enjoying ourselves, but the time came when the experience of leading the seminars began to feel like performance, and I have always had a low threshold for boredom. (I have a hunch it's essential equipment for a writer.) Since we were knocking ourselves out and losing money, the decision to stop was not terribly hard to reach. Shortly thereafter we put the Fort Myers house on the market and spent two years and change driving around the country. Then we came back to New York, and we've been here ever since.

The seminar's over and done with, the book's out of print—but Write For Your Life has somehow refused to die. People who took the seminar keep turning up to tell me what a powerful and lasting effect it had on them. All sorts of people want the book—and I haven't had books to sell them. My stock of 5,000 copies has long since dwindled to a single box of two dozen, and, while I sell lots of books through my newsletter and on my website, I've been reluctant to put these on the market; the book commands a very high price as a collector's item, and I wouldn't feel comfortable charging that kind of premium to someone who wants the book for its content, not its collector value.

The obvious answer would be to reprint the book, but I haven't been in a rush to do that, either, because it's out of date in certain significant ways. It talks about the seminar itself as an ongoing entity, and it's not; I've been there and done that, and the last thing I intend to do is return to the seminar dodge. It would take substantial rewriting to update the book in that respect.

Then too, the tone of the book is more Gee Whiz than I'm comfortable with sixteen years later. It would take a lot of work to tone that down, and it might very well be to the book's detriment.

For at least five years now I've been promising to get the book back in print, and I don't seem to find the time and/or inclination to fix it. So I've decided the hell with it. It strikes me as more important to get it back in print than to make it perfect, and toward that end I've done some light editing, and have written this introduction and urged you to read it in order to put the whole book in perspective. The book's insights still strike me as valid, and the exercises are still useful, and the whole thing still works.

I've made a few changes. My friend Bob Mandel wrote an introduction, which I've dropped, and I myself wrote a final chapter of acknowledgments, in which I said very nice things about a number of people. I've dropped that, too; I wish them all well, but the material seemed irrelevant.

Write For Your Life owed a lot to various seminars we ourselves took in what used to be called the Human Potential Movement. I've edited out specific references to these teachers and seminars insofar as possible, as I've lost touch with them, don't know what's still available, and don't know that I'd be inclined to recommend any of them in their present form.

If you want the original bound book, check my website, www.lawrenceblock.com. If I decide to put my remaining copies on the market, that's where you'll find them. Similarly, if our storage locker yields up copies of the Affirmations for Writers tape, or if I have it re mastered and decide to market it again, I'll let the world know via the website.

Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Block.