Keep Looking (Greener Pastures Provided)

TL;DR: The author is more concerned with his own brilliance as a writer than providing value to the reader. If you don't want to read a book that trivializes your genuine struggles with writing, look elsewhere (suggestions provided).

Let me lead by saying every piece of advice in this book can be found in Marshall Goldsmith's "Triggers". The version narrated by Goldsmith himself is dynamic, engaging and truly understanding of how hard it can be to better yourself. If you want better advice on how academic writing works out in the wild (which might quiet the voices saying "your writing isn't good enough"), get Helen Sword's "Stylish Academic Writing".

The narration in this book is not amazing, not the worst, but could be better. I don't have problems with most narrators regardless of their peccadillos( you adjust with time and just accept it as part of the book). If narrators are a deal-breaker for you be warned that Sorensen tends to elongate certain syllables with a downward inflection that makes the reading feel stilted and unnatural.

As for the contents of the book, its recommendations would fit on an index card (Stop making excuses to not write, Schedule time to write, use commitment devices like writing groups). The author makes no bones about the fact that if this advice doesn't work for you, you're the problem.

As you listen to this book, you get a real sense that Silvia's goal is not to help you improve your writing, but instead to tell you about how he writes and how this is clearly the best way to write. The most pernicious results are Silvia's insistence that (1) writer's block doesn't exist and that if you're having trouble writing you should just write more (a piece of advice that I'm sure has never occurred to anyone who's having trouble writing), and (2) if you think you have trouble following a schedule you're just wrong, "you follow lots of schedules (like teaching schedules)", so it's stupid for you to say you're bad at following schedules. The problem with these statements (more than the fact that they are unempathetic to the diversity of problems faced by possible readers and trivialize the complexity of problems presented), is that they fail to provide concrete, objective, and actionable steps to improve your productivity.


The thrust of Slyvia's book is "you can write more if you follow my simple steps", but Slyvia never seems to stop to ask if his "greater volume" of writing is providing greater value for his reader (hint: it isn't).

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