Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life Book

I so so wanted to love this book, even though I saw it was published by none other than Writer's Digest Books. Augh! I am a writer, and a teacher of writing, and I love Peanuts, and grew up watching Snoopy fail at writing as I failed right with him. So the best thing about this book is reprinting all the actual Snoopy novel writing strips, which means you get to at the very least smile on every page.

So the editor Conrad contacts more than thirty writers and ask them to give advice to Snoopy (and, by association, we readers). But almost all of the advice is lame and obvious. And most of the writers are the caliber of ones we might associate with Writer's (and Reader's) Digest: Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Clive Cussler, Fannie Flagg, and so on. Just because I used that word "caliber" above, I am NOT a snob about these people and their books, I'm not, but there may be a reason their writing about writing is so boring to me and such lame advice.

But! Ray Bradbury actually responded to their requests to write advice to Snoopy and wrote the best--and practically the only decent--one, detailing all of his own failures, which he calls a "snowstorm" of rejection slips that flowed over him through almost two decades until he started to see some success. Overall, however, this book was SO disappointing. 3 stars ONLY for the Snoopy strips.