Anyone can benefit from the opportunity to become a more thoughtful and compassionate reader by reading and considering the ideas in this work, even if they don't share the same religious views as the author.

Thank you to Netgalley and Worthy Publishing for an adcanced reader copy of this vook. All opinions are my own.

I randomly stumbled across this book as I thumbed through available titles on Netgalley. This book is hard to describe; it's so different from nearly anything I've read before. Essentially, it's a guide on viewing the act of writing as co-creating with our Creator, God. It's an ode to the responsibility and serious undertaking that is writing when approached with the intent to glorify God. And it's in some ways, a treatise of the ethics of writing. Which... all sounds mind-numbingly boring. But it's not.

The author touches on the fear of today's writers due to cancel culture and the sharp decline of creative and courageous work we've seen as a result.

<i>Many readers, however, and at least a few writers, are preoccupied with mirror work. Such readers approach books as if they were a magic mirror, not asking for transformation, but for reinforcement of preexisting beliefs. Are their opinions echoed point for point? Are they personally reflected in the book, and if so, are they represented favorably? If they're not made to feel good about themselves, or told they are the fairest in the land, these readers feel entitled to punish the author.</i>

The author references "paranoid reading" whereby <i>the reader enters the material searching, if not hoping, to find something offensive and condemnable... while this has become a popular pastime of the modern critical race and queer theorists, puritanical readers are no less guilty as they also can enter every book searching for a moral that is executed according to their standards. This becomes apparent when they start dividing authors and books, into the elect or the damned, proclaiming this or that path to the salvation of the soul, and imposing orthodoxies or punishing heresies.</i>

This quote is fantastic. I just don't want to forget it. The last sentence in this quote shook me. I'm a psych nurse and the leader of my unit. I DO inherently view empathy as a positive trait, but after reflection of this quote recognized the truth to it. It's a skill. And sometimes this skill CAN work against us. Simply feeling empathy does not indicate the need to follow after it. Sometimes we have to fire the single mom who put a patient in danger because of willfully choosing to follow policy. That doesn't make us evil because our heart was breaking in the process and we felt empathy for this person.

<i>Our willingness to recognize other peoples' human rights must not be based upon transient and subjective emotions aroused by storytelling because storytelling is just as capable of arousing fear, rage, and hatred towards individuals and groups and cutting off our awareness of others humanity, as it is capable of doing the opposite. The recognition and codification, in protection of human rights, must instead be based upon wisdom justice and fairness which are not altered by changes in emotional valance. A more fundamental mistake is seeing empathy as a positive virtue rather than a neutral, useful skill.</i>

<i>We are responsible for doing the work set before us to the best of our ability. The world's reception of our work is not our concern.</i> Ah-men, bruh-thah.

This book is a work of art in itself. I could have done without several sweeping generalities about human behavior and society that, while true in part, should have used more specificity. But overall, I felt inspired and moved to write again after a long hiatus. This book is an excellent reminder that writing is not just an indulgent pastime. It's a calling and responsibility if one is gifted and led to put pen to paper.

I'd rate this a G.

Original review posted 7/6/24.

Combines writing advice with Christian living advice

I appreciated Ms. Yu's writing style and advice. Her backlog of books and stories is impressive and I aspire to implement the advice in my own path to a similar place. I really appreciated her way of writing about creation being a joint effort between humans and God, using various analogies that will be common to those who have spent any time in either the Catholic or Protestant churches, at least in the USA. I cannot speak to how these places of encountering the holy are in other countries much, having only attended a funeral in a Catholic Church in a different country with a different language for the entirety of the services. But, all parts of breaking, blowing, burning, and making were present even when I didn't understand what was being said in the human tongues, much like inspiration and in-spirit living breaks us, blows on us, burns in us, and makes more of what we had to begin with when we look with eyes of love at the world around us and at ourselves, our writing, and our communities. I appreciate that the diversity of authors represented in the book and the complexities of being able to intersect on many levels of creation. I appreciate NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy to read; all opinions are my own and freely given.

Break Blow Burn & Make : A Writers Thoughts on Creation by E. Lily Yu Book Review


In Break Blow Burn & Make, E. Lily Yu . She begins the book by describing how writing is like an incandescent. The writer starts with a light and sometimes it can be seen a small flame just waiting to burn brighter. The dust and ashes are left by the living of one’s life. She compared it to a dragonfly and the world begins to shift and emerge and it searches for a reader. It the writing is good it will eventually burn through our preconceptions and change our way of living. She has felt like there is a missing vital flame in most the writings in today’s times. She explained how readers are now in search of books that offer their mirror way of thinking and help to reinforce our preexisting beliefs. She explored how literature is changing and how love, grace, wisdom is vanishing quickly. There is a dwindling in congregations and how many people are gathering together. She explained how she left a nondenominational church after some leader in another state declared that COVID-19 was an answer from his own personal prayer that God would bring down punishment. She shared how writers and readers need to recover what has been lost to catch the new flame and to get their fire back.


She explained how inspiration occurs and how gratitude has immensely helped her. She realized that this helped her with the very first blessing and it will help her to improve for hopefully a second one. This is an act of an inward response of thankfulness when we receive an idea or a new solution to our writing. She opened up about how she had an experience on working on first draft of her novel. She felt led to stop and to instead focus on another story that was demanding her full attention. She admitted how normally it takes her four drafts with hard editing and this time it was like she was being pulled into the way she should go. She learned to give thanks for this rare occurrence from her Creator. She explained how each artist is able to choose if they will grow their living story and it take them through pleasant and unpleasant tasks and we can freely receive the gift or refuse it. We have to be open to listening to the voice that instructs us to write when we need to write. She clarified how critical is to have the mindset we are called to serve others with our writing and not believe we should be the ones who are served.



I would recommend this inspiring book about creative and how writing has dramatically changed over the years. She has an unique way in describing the writing process and illustrating how their is a lost flame and art to good writing. She believes most of the writing now is missing the craft and language of the past. One of the most interesting things, she shared was how in 1895, J.B. Wise was found guilty of mailing out obscene materials containing Isaiah 12:36 and he was fined $50 dollars for doing so. I liked how she explored how Christian writing has also changed and how we have lost the truth and the love of Christ. This book is geared to help readers to read and write more deeply and being honest with themselves.

The title of this book comes from John Donne's "Batter my heart three-person'd God" sonnet, so you know from the outset you're in for a banger. E. Lily Yu does not disappoint, bringing the fire, which-as she writes in chapter one--"burns through our preconceptions and our whole way of living, and increases the complexity, order, and richness of our lives."

This is indeed a bold book. The author has the audacity to claim that the last decade of (Christian) publishing has been a dearth of truly worthy writing. (I was reminded of Marilynne Robinson's nonfiction essays, in her willingness to state bold convictions but with lyricism and grace. The mention of Marilynne Robinson of course immediately refutes Yu's claim, but not in that it is at least somewhat hyperbolic.) I thought it was beautifully written ("the biblical promise of a land flowing with milk and honey is not an exemption from stings or labor, but a guarantee of both"), and I gobbled it up over four days.

The book has an eclectic eccentricity, touching on Christian epistemology, a theory of literary reception, writing advice, and mostly Christian spirituality. I'm not one prone to read books on The Writing Life or Being A Creative, but this is in many ways one of those book (and one in which she names omphaloskepsis as a real problem of such books).

The chapter on vocation is worth the book alone: "Each one of us has been placed on this planet to do at least one beautiful thing that no one else is capable of doing, as long as we assent to that purpose and the preparation, discipline, and long working out of it."

Thanks to NetGalley and Worthy Publishing for the ARC!

In "Break, Blow, Burn, and Make," E. Lily Yu writes with the galvanized conviction of a street preacher that true art is a divine collaboration. It’s a view far more traditional—more classical—than that held by most people, which renders the book occasionally entrancing and often grating.

Simply put, Yu doesn't like a lot of what is published. I think there’s a lot of merit to the author’s critiques of how tidy and toothless genre categorizations can be, encouraging readers to dull their palate rather than expand it. Similarly, her concerns with the superficiality of much online literary “criticism” feel resonant, as she notes the way it fosters simplistic moral prescriptivism and plays into a medium that already favors puritanism.

All that said, Yu’s subjective tastes—many of which I share—are unsteadily elevated to objective truth, and the tone feels more than a little “back in my day.” I don’t think generative artistry is as dead as Yu seems to think, and I’ve read dozens of new books that embody that spirit, even within the past few months. While Yu is obviously well-read, her influences throughout "Break, Blow, Burn, and Make" feel limited, and they loom almost oppressively over the text. This is a book where George Macdonald and G.K. Chesterton are the literary greats, and Yu utilizes a lot of stylistic emulation that feels anachronistic—at one point, readers encounter the phrase “I waxed wroth.”

The book is so focused on how we write from something that it feels like it loses sight of what we write toward. Yu is very concerned with form, and while I also feel like prose should be given more attention, the metrics the author uses feel archaic and insensitive to the way language changes.

Art might be rooted in the ineffable, but it should probably recognize that most people won’t use the word “ineffable.”

Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer's Thoughts on Creation by E. Lily Yu is a call to creativity for Christian writers. The author discusses the process of creativity in detail, using quotes from writers throughout history to make each point. This book is a call to truly creative, not formulaic fiction, fiction that takes everything we are in a way that mimics the creative work of God. This is the Christian writer’s high calling. Overall, this book is an interesting read. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher with no obligations. These opinions are entirely my own.