Alice Mattison is the author of The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. I’ll bet her publisher saddled her with all the promise in that subtitle. But I can promise you that Mattison has some pertinent, honest, off-the-wall things to say.

About expectations:

A piece of writing may begin with what’s personal, but by the time we offer it for publication, we had better think of it as a work product….Your writing is not your child; it’s work, but unfortunately a kind of work that is often unpaid, badly paid, or weirdly paid: writers who make lots of money are often as baffled as the rest of us….The money, though there may be some, will never make sense.

About revision:

To read your work objectively, it’s helpful to surprise your piece of writing into thinking you’re someone else. To do that, put it aside for anywhere from a day to three years, the longer the better (up to a point). Then take it to a part of your house where you never write, or go elsewhere, and wear something unusual so it won’t recognize you—a cap, perhaps, or a jaunty scarf, especially if you are not jaunty.

About persistence:

Someone who has been unable to publish three or four novels and is on the third draft of her current novel may still have to start over, and even that doesn’t mean she’s hopeless or the book is hopeless. On the contrary, she may finally be on the verge of learning to write a novel—yet that often seems to be the moment when she decides to give up.

Mattison also gives us her eight disadvantages of being a writer:

• No money
• No respect
• No response for a long time to what you’ve written
• No structure helping you to get started
• No structure warding off interruptions (no guardian to say, “She’s in a meeting”)
• No guarantee that you’ll ever write anything that does anyone any good
• No guarantee that, even if you do, the particular piece you’re writing right now is worth your time
• No colleagues

And the one advantage, which outweighs the Evil 8: “The pleasure of it, the pleasure of words, the pleasure of telling a story.”

I admit I didn’t finish The Kite and the String; I tend to skim writing books looking for what speaks to me. Mattison is a teacher of literature as well as writing, and much of her book reads like a tour through English lit. She can be an amusing tour guide. She sums up the plot of Moby-Dick as one question: Where is that whale? The chapters everyone skips, which are about fish, she compares to an Amazon driver having to divert down several cul-de-sacs before it can get back on the highway.

“Being a writer is a profession, not the last scene of a romantic comedy,” Mattison writes, as she tackles the wide world of misconceptions. As one of my coaches used to say, though usually not to me, “Boy you got that right.”

This book is fun for veteran scribes, particularly the chapter “Rethinking Our Thought Bubbles,” and informative for rookies. Four paws up.