Write For Your Life: The Home Seminar for Writers

The do-it-yourself edition of bestselling author Lawrence Block’s groundbreaking seminar for writers!

In the 1980s, bestselling author Lawrence Block developed an innovative, interactional seminar that adapted elements of the human potential movement, specifically for writers. For several years, he and his wife, Lynne, traveled the country conducting workshops that focused on the inner game of writing and were designed to enable participants to get out of their own way and put their best work on paper.

Written to ensure the course material would be made available to the largest audience possible—and at a lower price—Block self-published this book in 1986, in a print run of 5,000 copies, which sold out in short order. A few years later, he stopped offering the seminar, having tired of the guru trip and preferring to concentrate on his own writing. For years afterward, WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE was nearly impossible to obtain.

When ebooks became popular, Block arranged for HarperCollins to publish WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE in its digital format. Still, he continued to hear from fans mourning the print edition.This is, after all, the sort of text one wants to be able to page through, making the printed book more user-friendly. In the fall of 2013, an assistant found the last box of the 1986 edition in a storage cupboard; Block offered them in a newsletter, and all 25 copies sold out within three hours.

This is the original text, with a new foreword bringing it up to date. With the book, as with the seminar, it doesn't matter at all where you are in your writing career or what kind of writing you do. That's all beside the point. WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE is about making the best out of who you are and where you are.

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His most recent novels are THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS, featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr; HIT ME, featuring philatelist and assassin Keller; and A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF, featuring Matthew Scudder, who will be played by Liam Neeson in the forthcoming film, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES. Several of his other books have also been filmed, although not terribly well. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic TELLING LIES FOR FUN & PROFIT, and THE LIAR'S BIBLE; for fourteen years he wrote a popular column on fiction writing for Writer's Digest Magazine. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (TILT!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.