Published: May 12, 2011
Words: 667,623 (approximate)
Language: English

Short description

A compilation of the author's works over the years.

Extended description

Steven Travers is the most prolific, hard-working and versatile writer in America today. "The Writer's Life", which is a collection of his works, is one of the most instructive books ever written on what it is like to be a writer. This is not a nuts-and-bolts instruction guide. It is inspiration to get off your behind, take on what Hemingway called the White Bull, and write. If Steve can do it, so can you. Inside Steve's work is far more than the Jim Murray-inspired entertainment that infuses his sports stories. Rather, here is an up-close encounter with the process of writing in every way. The business of writing. Dealing with lying editors and incompetent little people clinging to their feifdoms. The brutality of rejection and the brilliant light of public acceptance. Most of all, Travers' story is the story of a writer who refuses to quit and comes back…time after time after time! It is the story of a man who will not let the lesser lights and Dumbellionites of the Earth bring h.. (Read more) Steven Travers is the most prolific, hard-working and versatile writer in America today. "The Writer's Life", which is a collection of his works, is one of the most instructive books ever written on what it is like to be a writer. This is not a nuts-and-bolts instruction guide. It is inspiration to get off your behind, take on what Hemingway called the White Bull, and write. If Steve can do it, so can you. Inside Steve's work is far more than the Jim Murray-inspired entertainment that infuses his sports stories. Rather, here is an up-close encounter with the process of writing in every way. The business of writing. Dealing with lying editors and incompetent little people clinging to their feifdoms. The brutality of rejection and the brilliant light of public acceptance. Most of all, Travers' story is the story of a writer who refuses to quit and comes back…time after time after time! It is the story of a man who will not let the lesser lights and Dumbellionites of the Earth bring him down.
Travers, the author of the Best Selling "Barry Bonds: Baseball's Superman", ranges and flexes his writing muscles in as a broad a way as any living scribe. He is a sports historian and author of the popular Distant Replay series. He is a prep sports expert and an insider who has been a major columnist covering professional sports in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Steve is a California historian who has also written extensively about the military and politics. That is only the beginning. He is a novelist, a playwright, a song writer, and a busy screenwriter with 15 scripts under his belt. Travers is not your typical writer. At 6-6, 225 pounds, this ex-professional baseball player does not waste his time wearing black and sitting around cafes talking about writing. He lives the motto "writers write." He is also not the typical nihilistic brooding liberal that make up so much of modern punditry. He is a conservative who infuses his politics with hope based on a Christian worldview. That does not prevent him from being funny, profane, sexual and outrageous, though. Here is a writer who has written about porn stars, Presidents and John Wooden.
"The Writer's Life" is your opportunity to get a birds-eye view of the entertainment industry from an insider who has war stories to tell about "development hell" and the slicksters trying to take advantage of writers in Hollywood. He has gone up against the big, bad world of New York publishing and lived to tell about it. Like a previous generation of Americans, he lived in Europe, gaining a cosmopolitan perspective without losing his patriotic love for the United States. He has gained an insider's position in the high-voltage world of sports superstars like Barry Bonds; worked with celebrities such as Charlie Sheen; experienced some of the world's sexiest women and has the "kiss-and-tell" stories to prove it; and rubbed elbows with the movers and shakers of politics.
Whether you are an aspiring writer or just enjoy great writing, this book promises to be one of the most entertaining, enlightening, and broad-reaching you will ever read. Travers' writing heroes include Ernest Hemingway, William Goldman, David Halberstam, Hunter S. Thompson, William Safire, David Mamet, and William Shakespeare. His attempts - both succeses and failures - to stretch out and write like his heroes is part of what makes Travers' book so human and real. His story is not one of great riches and literary fame, but rather it is the struggle that is "The Writer's Life": The passion to reach out and write, every day, because that is what he has to do. Because it is in him!
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Tags

memoirs

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Reviews

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Review by: W. Addison Gast on May 15, 2011 :
WOW. If that is a writer's life,....excuse me. I want, need friends. Travers, who I have never read before, either in paperback or any of his columns ( Hmmm, wonder why? I lived in the L.A. area from 1946 to 2005) Jim Murray I appreciate, Bo Bolinsky is a story in himself. Travers was evidently close friends with Hunter Thompson--the guy we called "The psycho behind the stallag 17 fence" When I visited Aspen several winters including 1969. Thompson's voice was certainly sui generis and his crowd of friends--evidently including Travers, were not considered locals. Back to this book; opinionated, somewhat racist and certainly politically biased has nothing to do with a writer's life in general IMHO. It is a review of a guy that was a sports writer and in that catagory of journalism was introduced to several people that he felt free to write opinions about. The book has too many pages, rambles from his hots for Sarah Palin to Halberstam (another friend in the Thompson clan tent)to rants about Tom Wolfe's work. I lasted to page 1276 where he started giving writing instructions on plot and characters. I do not know if Travers was trying to compete wordwise with War and Peace for number of useless pages or just wanted a big novel but I had to be a quitter by then. Maybe I should have gone on to page 1800 before the multitude of reviews following and found the reason for this effort?
(review of free book)

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