“First of all, the pub date is April 1st, 2014. But you can order this NOW direct from Hawthorne books. Link? Link. http://hawthornebooks.com/catalogue/i-loved-you-more
There were so many things I took away from Tom Spanbauer’s workshop. But two of them really stood out in this book, and stood out in a way where I can recommend the book to anybody.
The first one, that a writer should tell a story the way he would tell it to a dear friend he hasn’t seen in years, 2 cocktails in. You pick up your old friend at the airport, you say, “Have I got a story for you. But first I need a drink.” Right in the middle of that second Ginger Whale (a drink that some idiots call a Highball, missing the obvious combination of the words “whiskey” and “ginger ale”), you start in.
This book, it’s like that. Except better.
You know how your friends have one or two really great stories? Tom Spanbauer is the friend who has dozens. More than dozens. Some of them are sad, some are hilarious. A lot of them are a lot more than one thing. All of them are incredible, and all of them are told just right.
The beauty is, sometimes when a friend has this many great stories, you kind of hate that person. You know, every part of his or her life is Epic. Life-Changing. Really Made Me Re-Evaluate. But this book, this book strikes the perfect balance. You believe the narrator. You want to hear how his stories end. But he’s not in it to make himself out to be the hero.
The second thing, quoting another author, he said that a reader should be brought to his knees, riven before the event. It’s a great description of how it feels to finish a great book. You just don’t know what to do next. You sit there, holding it closed, and it’s hard to believe that everything happened in between those covers. The book feels larger, heavier. It’s hard to believe, after you read a book like I Loved You More, that these things didn’t happen to EVERYBODY. That you can’t go up to people and say, “Remember when Ben and Hank went to that book thing in Idaho and…”.
The book, this book. It felt like the whole world.
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