Creative Writing Books

Write What You See: 99 Photos to Inspire Writing

Hank Kellner

Amazon Price: $18.21 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cottonwood Press, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $13.96

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

This book will launch a thousand essays! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

"Write What You See" is a godsend for writers and teachers of writing. It's a simple premise: Compelling photos spur thoughts and emotions. Serious writers (and student writers) will find much fodder here in the photos, as well as in the prompts.

I teach English, and I regularly heard, "I don't know what to write about." This book fixes that! Everyone has an opinion/feeling on these photos!

I highly recommend this book for poets, prose writers, and for their teachers.

Editorial Review:

Compiled by a successful photographer and former teacher of English, this collection of black-and-white photographs is accompanied by a wide variety of inventive writing prompts to motivate students. In addition to the author's own suggestions for using photography in the classroom, the guide shares more than two dozen ideas from real teachers across the country who have successfully used photography in the teaching of writing. The book also includes a CD-ROM so that teachers can use a video projector to display the photographs and writing prompts.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Test

List Price: $23.00 By: Pantheon Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $2.75

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( L ) -> Lamott, Anne
Subjects -> Reference -> Writing -> Journalism

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 328 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

disappointed 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I've been reading a bunch of memoirs on writing lately, notably On Writing by Stephen King and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. What irritates me about Ms. Lamott's writing is her inability to grasp the effect of her socioeconomic status and racial privilege on her success.

Lamott says, of her college days, "I was drawn to oddballs, ethnic people, theater people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians." By her own admission, she is normal, while the rest of us are different. Exceptional by virtue of our idiosyncracies -- be they race, gender, or sexual orientation.

In essence, she is a middle class, college-educated white woman whose father was a writer. There is a certain degree of privilege in that, but Lamott is unwilling or unable to own up to that privilege. She claims her experience as a universal one and, by omission, pushes all others to the margins.

Of South and Central American writers, Lamott writes: "When I read their books, I feel like I'm sitting around a campfire at night where they are spinning their wild stories...I understand why this style is so attractive to my students: it's like primitive art. It's simple and decorative, with rich colors...like watching a wild theater piece with lots of special effects."

She describes one character as "an old black woman from the South," as though this description alone is evocative, stumbling over her own predisposition for campfire/mammy imagery.

While I struggle to write the people in my life, many of whom happen to be "ethnic" -- for lack of a pithier, though less derogatory, adjective for non-white -- as real people and not caricatures, hundreds of successful writers sell books peopled by old black women from the South.

It seems unfair that those of us who conceive of ourselves as "ethnic" must shoulder the burden of our sensibilities alone.

Editorial Review:

Think you've got a book inside of you? Anne Lamott isn't afraid to help you let it out. She'll help you find your passion and your voice, beginning from the first really crummy draft to the peculiar letdown of publication. Readers will be reminded of the energizing books of writer Natalie Goldberg and will be seduced by Lamott's witty take on the reality of a writer's life, which has little to do with literary parties and a lot to do with jealousy, writer's block and going for broke with each paragraph. Marvelously wise and best of all, great reading.

Movies in the Mind, How to Build a Short Story

Colleen Mariah Rae

List Price: $14.95 By: Sherman Asher Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $0.35

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

If you're on the fence about buying this book, jump down! 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 22 people found this review helpful.

Before I finished the first chapter of this book, I saw a dramatic difference in my writing. If you want to learn how to connect with the mysterious well where all of our stories come from, if you want to understand what really grabs your reader and connects him/her with your story, read this book! It's not just for short story writers. It's for writers. Period. Look through Colleen Mariah Rae's eyes as you devour this book, and you'll see your creative world in a whole new light!

Inspire & Enhance Writer's Craft 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is great, will really rev up your writing, and I'm not the only one who says so. The February 2001 issue of Wisconsin Bookwatch has the review : With "Movies In The Mind: How To Build A Short Story", Colleen Rae provides the aspiring writer with compendium of sound advice, techniques, and strategies for writing plausible, believable, resonating fiction. Each informative chapter is a gem of sound, practical, illustrative, and occasionally inspiring instruction and includes: Entering The Storymaker's Realm; Fiction's Building Blocks; Participatory Art; Digging The Clay; Whose Story Is It Anyway?; Unlocking Your Story; How To Birth A Story; and There's Always A Critic. Very highly recommended for anyone seeking to improve the quality of their fiction," Movies In The Mind" is further enhanced with a section of Exercise Pages, a Reading List; and a user-friendly index.

Turning Life into Fiction: Finding Character, Plot, Setting and Other Elements of Novel and Short Story Writing in the Everyday World

Robin Hemley

List Price: $14.99 By: Story Pr Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $0.01

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Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> History & Criticism -> General
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> History & Criticism -> General AAS
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

If you've got friends who are fiction writers, watch out: "Writers are spies, liars, and thieves," writes Robin Hemley in Turning Life into Fiction, and your words, deeds, and character--benevolent and malevolent alike--could be immortalized in print some day. If you write fiction, listen up, look around, and take note. Why strain your brain making things up when you can transform real life into stories worth telling? Hemley recommends keeping a journal ("It's akin to an artist's sketchbook"), writing down your dreams (the unconscious is a great source of free material), and mining all those crazy stories your grandmother used to tell. Then combine bits and pieces from these sources, take one great mind leap (and many drafts) and--voila--you've got fiction. Warning: even though it really happened, it might not be believable. Second warning: while it's hard to know when something you write will offend the person it's based on, says Hemley, "above all, don't mess with male pattern baldness."

1998 Writer's Market: Where & How to Sell What You Write (Annual)

List Price: $27.99 By: Writers Digest Books Amazon Marketplace: 65 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This freelance writer's bible, available for the first time in paperback, weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. For novices, there are chapters on query writing, negotiating contracts, and the like, as well as firsthand reports from various publishing professionals. The bulk of the book comprises comprehensive listings for more than 4,200 places to sell your words, from book publishers (more than 1,250) to magazines (more than 2,000) to greeting-card companies, script buyers, writing contests, and a handful of online markets. The entries vary in thoroughness (depending on how helpful a specific publisher was), but most are quite complete, including a description of the publishing company or publication, contact names, and tips from the editors on how best to get your pen in the door. The tips range from the truly useful to the nearly useless ("Ride a motorcycle and be able to construct a readable sentence!" recommend the folks at CC Motorcycle Magazine). This is an invaluable resource: all the work that goes into requesting writer's guidelines and trying to figure out how best to get published somewhere can be put toward, well, writing. The 1998 Writer's Market is also available in CD-ROM (includes a handy submission tracker) and as a book/CD-ROM package.

Blood on the Forehead: What I Know About Writing

M. E. Kerr

List Price: $14.95 By: HarperTeen Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $0.88

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Award-winning novelist M. E. Kerr shares for the first time the stories behind--and excerpt from--five of her novels and five short stories and offers young people dozens of sensible writing tips that can be used immediately by any aspiring writer of fiction. A professional writer who has earned her living solely as an author from the year after she graduated college to the present, Ms. Kerr--with her usual mix of sparkling with and common sense--talks about how she gets her ideas and, more important, how she uses them to create her stories.

Whether you are writing your next school assignment or thinking about writing as career, Blood on the Forehead gives you a fascinatinginsight into the way one highly successful author approaches her own work.For decades, Marijane Meaker has delighted readers of all ages. Shes written under the names Vin Packer, M. J. Meaker, and Mary James. But as M. E. Kerr, writer of books for young adults, she has won perhaps her greatest audience.In Blood on the Forehead M. E. Kerr shares both the stories behind and excerpts from five of her novels and five short stories for young adults, as well as tips about what writers need to remember in order to write fiction successfully (e.g., Courtesy #10 to extend to your reader: Cut! Cut! Cut! Your reader has a life.). With her usual mix of sparkling wit and common sense, Kerrs personal journey through the writing process is sure to buoy the spirits of any reader faced with the next writing assignment.