A Writer Prepares

A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Writer Prepares is an account of the early years of Lawrence Block.

Lawrence Block has been one of my favorite living crime writers for almost twenty years at this point so I snapped this up once I figured I had enough free time to read it.

A Writer Prepares covers the early career of Lawrence Block, from his stints in college to toiling at the Scott Meredith agency to cranking out one or more porno books a month to make ends meet. The book ends with The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, the book that Block feels lifted him to the next plateau.

Some of the stories were touched on in Block's other non-fiction, although I enjoyed reading them again. I'll never get tired of the story of Block cranking out a book in three days to pay the hospital bills after his daughter was born. Other aspects were new to me, like the drinking binges, moving to Wisconsin to work for a coin collecting magazine, or drinking cheap cough syrup that contained codeine for years.

Block wrote most of this in the 1990s and finished it in 2020, assuming he'd catch covid and die at some point in the near future. Thankfully, he didn't AND he finished the book. Block's frank about mistakes that were made and things that he might have done differently. He also doesn't pretend his books have all been masterpieces but isn't ashamed of them either, most of them having been reprinted fairly recently, some self-published.

A Writer Prepares is an interesting look at the foundational years of Lawrence Block. Five out of five stars.

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