Part Stephen King's On Writing, part Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and part Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, A Commotion in Your Heart tells a series of stories about how the author learned the craft of fiction and came to live a writer's life. The stories are personal: What Gordon Lish taught her about how sentences work, what a close friend's imprisonment taught her about character, what a drawing class taught her about point of view. The book's spirit of camaraderie, its insights grounded in everyday life, will help aspiring writers along the path and remind more seasoned writers that they're all in this together.