Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark ( Review )
[ I wrote this short review of Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools back in 2016. I only posted it on Twitter, and Mr. Clark even commented on it. Anyway, sense it's one of my favorite books on writing, I'd figured I'd share it. I took a break for a few months, but look for new post in the coming months. Enjoy! -RH ]
Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools is over ten years old now. This best seller by the senior scholar, and vice president of the Poynter Institute, is one of the most important books I've ever read; I keep a copy of it on me almost everyday, when I venture out into the world. I carry it in a ziploc bag, resting right on top of my composition. I've read it from front to cover at least twelve times, and have read it in no particular order many times more.
There are numbers of great books on writing(The Elements of Style. On Writing Well.etc) but I see Writing Tools as a gateway to those other great works, and he is very generous with all of his sources. I discovered Clark's book while rummaging through a now defunct Barns & Noble.
The first thing that stuck me about it was how simple the instructions were to understand: 50 writing tools broken down into small and manageable chapters, with examples from some of the best poems, articles, and stories that you can find.
Clark's voice is warm and light, and it invites the reader into his life as a writer, and a teacher of writers. He has his own bias, but never comes off as a purist. As he says: " These are tools, not rules." Another pleasant surprise was how much of Clark's preferences mirror my own: "
' Prefer the simple over the technical',' Climb the ladder of abstraction' " and, defending the use of the "Oxford comma". His book is a rally cry, to show us that we all have the potential to be writers.
I once had a conversation with a thirty year old teacher, who adored poetry. I pulled out my notebook to share a few poems, and then suddenly, she caught a glimpse the Writing Tools cover, then she got really excited.
She explained that the high school that she worked at had issued it as a book to study for students who took their writing courses. This was a little reminder of what impact that Roy Peter Clark has made in the creative world.