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Weekend Reading-- A Writer's Tale

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The hardcover of this has been out for a while now but a few weeks ago, the expanded softcover edition of The Writer's Tale was released.  This book is a series of email correspondents between Benjamin Cook and Russell T. Davies, the lead writer and show runner on the first four seasons of BBC's Doctor Who.  It's not a how-to book, but through the emails, you see how Davies comes up with ideas and writes.  Their emails begin just as Season 3 of Doctor Who is starting to air and Davies has to begin putting Season 4 together.  Cook asks some common questions ("where do your ideas come from?") but he goes far deeper than that, pulling out of Davies his own highs, lows and anxieties of being a writer and being responsible for one of the biggest hits in British television.  And it's massive.  I think I'm about 100 pages into the book already and Davies is maybe just getting to writing the Titanic Christmas special, the first ep of Season 4.

The Writer's Tale is a good book for Doctor Who fans but an even better book for fans of writing.  It shows that there's no right or wrong way to do it; there's only the way of writing.