2 out of 4 stars
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The Life and Lessons of a Young Author is a brief overview of published author Sunayna Prasad’s writing journey throughout her early years of discovering herself as a writer. Prasad details both her own personal journey as a writer and the lessons she has learned about becoming published.
I chose to rate this novel 2 out of 4 stars because I found Prasad’s short exploration of writing a valiant attempt at helping young writers like herself, but I do not find Prasad’s advice particularly useful. Prasad did not offer anything new when it comes writing advice in my opinion. Her suggestions were useful albeit common advice which could have just as easily been found on several free to access websites in bullet-pointed lists.
I did think that the best piece of advice she gave was the suggestion that aspiring writers should seek ‘unbiased feedback’. As a writer myself, I struggled with finding useful feedback, much like Prasad, during my early years of writing because my close friends and family often did not wish to be completely truthful about my writing flaws. I’m glad she pointed this out as when young writers are told to seek feedback it is often not specified that the best feedback is unbiased.
Although I wish Prasad took her own advice and had someone edit this book for her. With Prasad being a published writer herself and stressing the importance of editing it was disappointing to see that the first sentence of chapter one contained a grammar error. Along with this the impression I got from her writing was not professional. It was like she was trying to phrase things to sound smarter than they need to be and thus left the syntax feeling unnatural. It made the advice she was giving the reader feel less valuable.
Another issue I had with this book was Prasad’s consistent return to the idea that she was a very talented young writer. Her announcement that she had ‘been writing stories since [she] was 6 years old’ and the following listing of the times she had been praised for her artistic talent as a young child felt unnecessary to whatever point she was trying to make. It felt like she was hyping herself up for no reason and came off a little snobbish to me. I am unable to speak to the quality of Prasad’s writing across her career as this is my first encounter with her, but for the lack of quality, she delivered in this book bothered me.
Overall, I would not personally recommend this book to people. I could not rate this book any lower than two stars as it is not a bad read and is a fair attempt to give writing advice, but I could only really see fans of Prasad really finding her own personal writing story interesting.
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The Life and Lessons of a Young Author
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