Writing with the Master: How One of the World?s Bestselling Authors Fixed My Book and Changed My Life - Hardcover

Vanderwarker, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1626365520 ISBN 13: 9781626365520

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2014

Synopsis

With seven unpublished novels wasting away on his hard drive, Tony Vanderwarker is astonished when John Grisham offers to take him under his wing and teach him the secrets of thriller writing. The beginning and the end are easy,” Grisham tells him. It’s the three hundred pages in the middle that’s the hard part.”

To ensure his plot doesn’t run out of gas, Grisham puts Tony though his outline process. Tony does one, and then Grisham asks for another and another and another. As they work together, Grisham reveals the techniques that have helped him create compelling bestsellers for more than two decades for instance, You’ve got to hook your reader in the first forty pages or you’ll lose them.” After a year of constructing outlines, Grisham finally gives Tony the go-ahead to start writing.

Writing with the Master immerses the reader in the creative process as Tony struggles to produce a successful thriller. It’s a roller coaster ride, sometimes hilarious, and often full of ups and downs. Grisham’s critiques and margin notes to Tony reveal his nimble imagination and plot development genius. For Grisham fans, Vanderwarker’s memoir pulls back the curtain on his writing secrets, and for aspiring writers, it’s a master class in thriller writing.

In the end, Tony resolves to take Grisham’s teachings to heart and eventually decides to write what he thinks he was meant to: a book about the creative process and his incredible two years working with John Grisham.

About this title

From the Author:

Tony Vanderwarker grew up in New England and attended Andover and Yale. He did a two-year stint in the Peace Corps before graduating from NYU with a degree in cinema. Tony worked in the film business in New York before he went into advertising in Chicago and ended up founding his own agency. Tony cashed out to move to Virginia and write on a horse farm outside of Charlottesville, where he lives with his wife, Anne, four dogs, and a donkey named Jethro.

From Booklist:

Perhaps every budding writer fantasizes about having a successful veteran author looking over his or her shoulder, offering warnings to help avoid the pitfalls of composing and submitting a first novel. Imagine, for instance, penning a crime thriller while John Grisham offers you advice on building suspense. For Vanderwarker, a former ad-agency owner who cashed in to focus on writing, this proved to be no idle fantasy; Grisham actually did help him pen his debut novel, the soon-to-be-released Sleeping Dogs. Since both were already friends and neighbors in Charlottesville, Virginia, some form of mentoring was perhaps inevitable, but Vanderwarker wisely waited until Grisham offered. Although this short but captivating story of their collaboration sometimes feels like a rushed, albeit unique, accompaniment to the novel, it’s brimming with invaluable literary lessons and amusing anecdotes, such as Vanderwarker’s wry descriptions of the ego bruising he endured from Grisham’s blunt criticism and prodding to construct a whopping seven outlines for his novel before he actually began writing it. Must reading for both aspiring thriller authors and die-hard Grisham fans. --Carl Hays

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1626365520
• ISBN 13: 9781626365520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208