Title: A Book Inside You?
Author: Danish Sayanee
Publisher: StoryMirror Infotech Pvt Ltd
Genre: Writing Guide
First Publication: 2021
Language: English
Book Summary: A Book Inside You? By Danish Sayanee
Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, using a range from personal exercises in catharsis to posterity and record keeping, recreation, and, of course, for publication and profit. For many, writing satisfies several of these needs.
No matter your reason for writing, doing it efficiently and effectively accomplishes your goals. Though there is no “right” way to write, there are strategies that can help transmit your thoughts concisely and clearly. There are also best practices that can make the most of your work.
This book explores some of those strategies that aid you to become a more potent communicator, providing advice, tips, and examples of what constitutes good writing and good writing habits. It could facilitate you to become a national bestseller!
Book Review: A Book Inside You? By Danish Sayanee
Honestly, if you’re a writer and you want to grow as a writer, you can’t go wrong reading ‘A Book Inside You?’ By Danish Sayanee. It gives the basics of being a writer and making a living at it. The author’s enthusiasm leaps off the page, and if nothing else, that exuberance will carry you with a full head of steam straight from this book and into your own book. Reading “A Book Inside You?” is like having the best kind of encouraging friend pat you on the back while shouting “YOU CAN DO IT!!!”
What Danish Sayanee is doing in this book is applying a capitalist sensibility to prose. Keep it simple. Economize. Cut out the fat. Go straight for the point. Author’s approach to writing is that of a factory owner seeking to improve his business model.
Eventually, if you want to write Things-That-Other-People-Want-to-Read and not just Things-That-Are-Good-to-Write, you need to work on the less free-spirited, less blue-sky, and occasionally less exciting stuff: structure, pacing, whittling away extraneous words. You need to learn to re-write. This book opens up the first important part of the writing process, of accessing imagination and getting words on the page. It’s easy to digest, coming in short chapters, and it really does make you think about what and how you write.
Even if you harbor no aspirations to writing, ‘A Book Inside You?’ offers a warm, illuminating and entertaining look at some of the things writers go through, provides some insight into the process of writing, and some of the challenges writers confront. If, however, you are a writer, aspire to be a writer, or indulge in analysis of writing, this book will feel like a kindly mentor, an older, wiser sibling maybe, who can take you by the hand and offer a gentle nudge in the right direction. Your writing may or may not soar, but Danish Sayanee’s excellent tutorial will certainly add a few feathers to your wings. Maybe those will be all you need to finally take that step away from the nest and let your creativity take flight.
The real victory of this book though comes in rescuing writing from the pomposity of the writing world. It approaches writing from it’s long abhorred but more important angle of craftsmanship. Writing is not just an art. Sure, there is art involved, but it’s also a craft, a skill that can be learned and honed and developed.
I recall hearing Neil Gaiman talk about how writers will write something, send it out, and wait for a response. If the responses come back negatively, then the writer decides that she is simply too far ahead of her time, or that the publishers simply don’t understand what she was doing. “They don’t get it,” is the writer’s common reply. Gaiman contended that the more likely truth is that what you’ve written simply isn’t any good. Maybe it could be good if you fixed it, but it isn’t now.
Craft is the bridge that allows you to fix it. It can’t really be fixed with art. This is a book about the craft of writing and every writer would do well to read it periodically. You’ll find new insights or discover new ways to approach the problems of writing. This is less of an instructional guide to the craft of writing and more of an extended pep-talk about living life creatively. This book will not necessarily guide you in how to create stellar characters or how to merge your sub-plot with your main plot-line, but it will aid you in going into your writing endeavors with a more sound mind and a better expectation of what the creative process holds. It is profound, anecdotal and full of wry observations about writing.
‘A Book Inside You?’ is a journey of an inspirational writer and creative writing instructor, filled with passion, warmth, insight, wisdom, rawness, humour and drama. If you’re looking for a way to break out of a writing rut, just get some notebooks filled, and find fresh ways of looking at the world, then this is your book.
