A Brief, Reasoned Argument to Counteract the Two-Second Judgment You’ve Made to Buy Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking

This book is not going to help your fiction. Seriously. Don’t buy it for that. I mean, buy it if you really want to read it, but don’t buy it just because you think it’s got some revolutionary thing to say that you can crib (and by “crib” I mean steal) for your fiction. I know, I know, you are not a plagiarist, but you know what I’m talking about. Don’t pretend that you don’t. It’s why you read Stiff and pretty much anything by Susan Orlean. Not that you didn’t like the writing, but c’mon. Be honest with yourself. Secretly, in that dark, awkward place that’s lacking security and covered with a sheet in your head, you were assessing this book’s worth for what it may do for your new fiction. Maybe, just maybe, like all those other cultural analyses and pop psychology pieces and quirky feature writings that you’ve plugged up your bookshelves with, maybe this piece of easy-to-read non-fiction is going to be the key to making your fiction more meaningful. It’s not. I know, that’s harsh. But it’s the truth. Did Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild or Into Thin Air suddenly make a Jack London out of you? No. So stop it. Leave the bookstore empty-handed and go out and get your own ideas. And really, while you’re at it, stop trying to find some obscure piece of history that you can distort into some overblown turd like Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code. It’s embarrassing.

P.S. Don’t you think this book had to be some marketing guy’s wet dream? I mean, a book about how spontaneous decisions are good and right? “Impulse buy,” anyone? Jesus, I’d be gluing these things to the Borders’ clerks’ foreheads if I were that guy …