In the 1980s, Lawrence Block developed an interactional seminar that adapted elements of the human potential movement specifically for writers. For several years he and his wife, Lynne, traveled the country conducting seminars that focused on the inner game of writing, and designed to enable participants to get out of their own way and put their best work on paper.

This book was written to make the seminar available to a larger audience, and at a lower price. Block self-published it in 1986, in an edition of 5000 copies, which sold out in short order. A few years later he stopped offering the seminar, having tired of the guru trip and preferring to concentrate on his own writing, and ever since the book’s been impossible to obtain.

When eBooks came around, Block arranged for HarperCollins to publish Write For Your Life in that format. But it’s the sort of text one wants to be able to page through, and a printed book is just more user-friendly. In the fall of 2013, an assistant found the last box of 25 copies of the 1986 edition in a storage cupboard; Block offered them in a newsletter, and they sold out within three hours.

This is the original book, with a foreword bringing it up to date. With the book, as with the seminar, it doesn’t matter at all where you are in your writing career, or what kind of writing you do. That’s all beside the point. Write For Your Life is about making the best out of what you are and who you are.