# Review ## Date 2022-05-20 ## What is the thesis? Word by word is an audiobook of a talk given at a writers workshop in Texas in 1999. . The major advice is regarding writing interesting things, starting with people, and developing the characters, and letting the action proceed around the characters. She gets into writing yourself and what you know, cautions around writing family and friends and how to find the essence. Additionally, to be a writer one needs to be a curious observer. She talks about engaging content experts. ## Am I convinced and why? Not really, my experience is that writing, like other creative arts, is idiosyncratic. However, the idea of creating small assignments and bad first drafts is great! I love that for a life advice. It reminds me of the idea that the longest journey starts with a single step. ## Summarize the argument It reminds me of other ideas of just writing a little every day. Your small assignment does not focus on quality, it focuses on doing the work, and then piloting or revising it nearly to death (but not too much). ## What is the other side of the argument? If you are producing multiple versions of poor quality work, you ware likely not ever going to produce anything good. So this is just the first step. ## What else do I wonder about? What is the revision process. How do you get good advice? ## Action I think this is just what I did with my [[Manuscript Draft for AIRS article Setnik, Park, Rudolph]] ## When do I want to stumble across this? #on/writing | #on/writing/process | #note/sourcereview/book ## Source: Lamott, Anne. (2004). _Word by Word_. Writer’s AudioShop.