Barbara Abercrombie

that they aren’t the only ones caught up in this glorious delusion — that we can write, and that it will not only heal us but will make the world better.”

— Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

It’s like getting a whole lifetime of writing wisdom packed into one year. I loved it.”

I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts….I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words.

— TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations, every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light.

— MICHAEL VENTURA

Why a year?

Because if you want to write a novel or a memoir or an autobiography you’ll need at least a year of focused work to get from the idea in your head to the reality of a first draft.

if you want to write short pieces, a year could get you from dreaming about being a writer to actually completing and marketing one or more personal essays or short stories. This is a book about writing your way through 365 days.

Why dangerously?

Because you have to. You have to write down this story that’s banging around in your head and in your heart or it’ll be lost. No one else will tell it

This isn’t a how-to book because no book can really teach you how to write.

The only way you learn to write is by reading and studying the kind of thing you would like to write — and by writing.

Or maybe you’ve been writing for years and are simply in a temporary funk and need to get unstuck. In any case, this is a why book.