Write For Your Life

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.