The Wayward Writer: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar

by Ariel Gore

When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life solving this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign--and where you can be a writer and survive. Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero's journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologize for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible to ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberatory literary utopia--and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work. Includes interviews with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Johnny Temple, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Reyna Grande, Michelle Ruiz Keil, Jisu Kim, Adrian Shirk, Mai'a Williams, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Laura Mazer.Add on a Wayward Writer patch when you order the book for a couple bucks!

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

318 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2022

About the author

ARIEL GORE is the author of We Were Witches (The Feminist Press, 2017), The End of Eve (Hawthorne Books, 2014), and numerous other books on parenting, the novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, the memoir Atlas of the Human Heart, and the writer’s guide How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness in January 2010.

Reviews

[jazmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a lot of craft books as a fiction writer. This one blew my mind.

I want to give this book to every writer I know, especially the ones who are just getting started and tell them that The Wayward Writers has the answers they need, even though they don't have any questions at the moment. The book will have answers. This book made me feel like a whole writer. A whole writer---a writer who is confident in their purpose as a writer. The whole book stuck out to me, but there were sections that particularly stuck out to me: "Unload Kingston's Gun," Gores's Grotto," and "Show and Tell." All of these little chapters really started to unravel harmful learning as I've grown as a writer. This book continues to remind me that it is okay to unlearn, to reimagine, and most importantly, to be authentic.

I now feel inspired to go after fellowships and residencies because I have found a way forward; the aspects of these applications are now demystified and I can apply with vigor and vulnerability. I really want to say thank you to Gore. This book has changed the way I see the writing world for good.

[Ty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Odd little book. Not without merit, i underlined several thoughts. But, (and perhaps it is by design) it seemed disjointed. Advice, memoir moments, interviews, random letters from unknown fans of the author and her answers to same.

Plus a recurring door theme that doesn't quite work, as it is forgotten about for long stretches and even abandoned long before the final page.

Author often speaks of feeling like an outsider, both early in her career and now. But at times I felt like one reading this, though I imagine that's the opposite of the intent. Just a lot of name dropping of both books and literary figures that I felt one should be more intimately familiar with than myself in order to get the most of certain chapters.

I was also a few chapters in before I sort of felt it was okay for a man to read this. I don't mean this in an anti-feminist way. But there were some times early on where I truly felt I picked up a books by mistake that was specifically intended for women/women-identifying folks. It becomes more general eventually, slowly, and much of this issue (if it can be called that) is probably more own perceptions at work. I just didn't want to encroach on a space that isn't mine, and I don't in the end think I did. Just felt like it for a while.

The ideas presented in the shorter marketing/business oriented sections I felt came from a place of slight privilege that many don't and will never enjoy. (despite the author having started out on welfare as a single Mom.) Advice leaning towards wayward writers making investments in real estate if possible to collect rent to supplement income felt wildly, glaringly out of place with much of the rest of the book. If she had been advised to do this before she was established, while trying to raise her child, would she not have balked? I think she probably would have.

It also becomes general and repetitive at times.

Picked it up with a gift card I got for Christmas. Not as inspirational as I had hoped, and I would not have been happy having paid about 23 dollars for it had I been required to do so.

You may think it worth it though, if you are just starting out with no idea how or what. Or if you are in the gender queer/ feminist space and feel excluded from some of the other more well known writing advise books.

[Johnny Di Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is a bit of a cheat: I've know Ariel since the early HipMama days, where I illustrated stickers and promos for the site, as well as the interior of Breeder. Also, we used this book in a year long writing intensive that required weekly readings, entries, reviews, critiques, submissions, and group Zoom calls. So my experience extends outside the book's pages.
One of the things that's separates this from the rest of its kind is a combination of real world trench warfare experience with dealing with the publishing world at large, and letting each individual water be their own person, which is at the diametric opposite of what so many writing classes and lecturers think are required of them. There's balance to be struck between the harsh disciplines that foment a decent writer and the mercurial nature of the muse and her inspiration, and Ariel forgets neither. Two years and a dozen published stories alter, I find myself revisiting these pages for grounding in a chaotic terrain that is our modern world, and reminds me why writing possessed me in the first place.

[Rebecca Kuder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is actually a school. So liberating and useful and inspiring! Ariel Gore is the realest of real deals.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ariel's books on writing are full of great advice and a joy to read. Great resource that you will refer to again and again.