Side Glances: Notes on the Writer's Craft

Ross Willmot is Executive Director of the Ontario Association for
Continuing Education.

The author’s lifetime of experience writing poems and prose for leading literary publications is here distilled in aphorisms for other writers. His reflections and reminders, while primarily intended for creative writers, are useful to more prosaic writers as well as readers. He does not think much of those, for example, who have “great ideas” in their heads but don’t put them on paper. Well established writers, he reports, often say that on days they simply do not feel like writing, they doggedly churn it out anyway. On looking over their work later, they find the quality is not much different from that achieved on days they were fired up.

Though Side Glances is no step-by-step how-to writer’s handbook, it will be a definite asset to the library of any writer or any teacher or student of writing.