Alex
Nutshell: Godin quotes heavily from Pressfield's [b:The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle 1319 The War of Art Winning the Inner Creative Battle Steven Pressfield https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574272133l/1319.SY75.jpg 722104], and you might be better off (re)reading that book instead.If you're looking for the equivalent of a Tony Robbins motivational speech for artists and creatives, you'll dig this. I really don't mean that as a criticism—sometimes you just want a pep talk in which someone tells you things you already know using pithy phrases and accessible examples.A key piece of advice in here, presumably drawn from Godin's experience in marketing, is to define your audience as specifically as possible. Seems like a good idea! But Godin isn't following his own advice. (As a bestseller, one supposes he doesn't have to.)So, is this book for artists? Broadly, yes. Is it for “creatives”—those who might once have been called commercial artists? Sure, them too, definitely. Is it for entrepreneurs, chefs, basically anyone? Mhm! Like most crossover business/self-help books, this one casts as a wide a net as possible. In one breath, startup founders are given pro-tips and encouragement. With the next, Godin takes shots at the corporate world by way of telling the artists in the audience to keep it loose.The upshot is that the advice herein is necessarily generic. How else could the author speak to so many audiences at once? Still, most of the advice is totally reasonable, common sense stuff. Hearing such advice again probably won't revolutionize the way you do your thing, but it won't hurt.
If you rate this book less than five stars, all your body hair below your eyebrows will fall out. For some of you, that might seem a desirable effect—a real timesaver. Let me caution you that a day will come when you'll wish desperately for the wicking effect of said body hair, and on that day you'll say out loud to no-one, “I shouldn't have been anything but effusive about that collection of rude scrawling” before slipping on a puddle of your own perspiration and taking a comical but injurious pratfall that necessitates many months of costly and tedious physical therapy.
Like Eno & Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, but for screenwriting and not (entirely) oblique.
If you've read all the usual screenwriting books, you likely won't learn anything new. You will, however, be chafed that the authors of all those other books could scarcely manage to convey in a chapter what Fancher gets across in a single clean sentence. If you haven't read those books, you may not need to after this one.
It's not a lot of pages for the money, but seeing as Fancher is preaching the gospel of creative and linguistic distillation, that shouldn't come as any surprise. It is what it needs to be.
