Love him or hate him, and there are some on either extreme, Douglas Wilson can flat-out write. He has put this talent to use in writing over thirty books and countless articles, blog posts and the like. In his newest book, Wordsmithy, he offers up a series of hot tips for the writing life, a collection of lessons that he has learned along the way.

I probably need to stop right here to say that I don’t want you to take this little review as a blanket endorsement of Wilson or his previous books or his theological emphases. There is a long list of issues on which he and I would not see eye-to-eye. But what is true is that he thinks deeply and expresses himself with both tremendous wit and clarity.

Wordsmithy is comprised of seven chapters, each of which holds seven tips (I’ll let you work out the math to see just how many tips that is). Here is a brief description of each of those seven chapters:

Know something about the world. You need to know something about the world outside of books. If you don’t learn about what exists outside libraries and bookstores, you will not have any material to work with.

Read. A writer needs to be a constant reader, reading the kind of thing he wishes he could write and the occasional thing that he wouldn’t ever want to write.