Last week I completed a paperback version of my latest book “Paint With Words”.
Why did I focus on writing? Vanity, possibly. Originality, certainly not. The Chinese got there first with the “I Ching” several millennia ago, which rather takes the shine off any claim to innovation.
No, it was probably because there are things I want to say before the lights go out and somebody sensible changes the locks.
I only wish my old English teacher were still alive so I could post him a copy with a note saying: Look, against all available evidence, it happened.
He dragged me through O-Level English with the exhausted patience of a man trying to rescue a shopping trolley from a canal.
But this isn’t a book about grammar in the joyless, ruler-rapped sense. It’s about learning how to say what you mean with precision, swagger and a bit of blood in the mouth.
How to build metaphors that don’t collapse under inspection, similes that aren’t recycled from Christmas crackers, headlines that land like a punch to the sternum, and sub-headings that lure the reader onto the next page, and the pages after that.
This book is for the beginner standing nervously at the edge of the literary swimming pool, and for the more seasoned writer who suspects they’ve started repeating themselves like a 60’s ballad on loop.
It’s about sharpening the tools: writing cleaner, harder, funnier, leaner prose in a world where every shelf, screen and algorithm groans beneath the weight of competition.
Because good writing doesn’t merely communicate, it seduces, provokes, humiliates, flatters and occasionally detonates.
And if you’re going to add another book to the tottering pile, it ought at least to arrive carrying a weapon of genuine destruction.
“Paint With Words” is available on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H243SB65. or use your own Amazon account for access.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
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