From the Preface by Clint McCown

Writers, I suspect, are largely contrarian by nature. We do tend to be misfits, after all, the outside observers, the ones who critique the status quo. That’s because the very nature of true art is revolutionary. Writers as dissimilar as Rainer Maria Rilke and Ursula K. LeGuin have insisted that the message of all art is the same: You must change your life. The poet Wallace Stevens told us plainly that Poetry is a destructive force. And as I once read on a tee-shirt, Good art won’t match your sofa.

These three claims about art are essentially the same. Each tells us that artists are here to rock the boat, to break the rules of what’s expected. So break the rules.

About Clint McCown

Clint McCown is the only two-time recipient of the American Fiction Prize. He has published four novels (The Member-Guest, War Memorials, The Weatherman, and Haints), and six volumes of poems (Labyrinthiad, Sidetracks, Wind Over Water, Dead Languages, Total Balance Farm, and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems). He has received the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, and a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association. In journalism, he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime. He has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and a Creative Consultant for HBO television. He is a former principal actor with the National Shakespeare Company, and several of his plays have been produced. He has edited a number of literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Praise for Mr. Potato Head Vs. Freud: Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction

Plainspoken, heartfelt, hilarious and absolutely whip-smart, Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud is the book on writing we've needed for a long time. At once contrarian and spot-on, this clearheaded guide never once loses sight of why we write: to reach out, as McCown so eloquently puts it, to the minds and hearts of our readers.

—Bret Lott, author of Jewel and The Hunt Club

As its title should suggest, it’s impossible to read Clint McCown’s Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud without laughing. McCown’s wit makes this the rarest of books on the craft of fiction: one that is as entertaining as it is instructive. And boy, is it instructive. It’s quite simply the wisest, most succinct, and most comprehensive overview of the ins and outs of writing fiction that I've ever read. How I wish it had existed when I first started writing; it could have saved me years of trial and (mostly) error.

—David Jauss, author of On Writing Fiction and Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories