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Outside the Square Fiction Workshop
An Interactive Workshop for Writers

by Cheryl Wright



     
A Desk Companion of Note for Beginning Writers

Veteran Writer Shares Experience with Others

Outside the Square Fiction Workshop: An Interactive Workshop for Writers is as much about sharing as it is about advising. Cheryl Wright, veteran writer and editor of Writer2Writer, gives her fellow authors information that she would have liked to have had when she was starting out. Although, this e-book is primarily for beginning writers, the exercises may work well for old writers who are so inundated in the printer's craft that we smell like printers' ink. After all, most of us occasionally suffer from that writer's block malady.

For this purpose, her chapter called Finding Ideas is excellent. I also like that she touches on marketing, a basic concept many new writers don't begin to understand until it is too late, when they all should know how important that is to the eventual outcome of their careers.

Wright uses one of my favorite words, "recycle." In The Frugal Book Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won't, I use it to encourage writers to publish the same articles in many different places in order to get clips, build the packages writers need to sell their books to agents or publishers and, once published, to sell their books. Cheryl encourages her readers to "recycle" the sections in her workbook, each time acquiring new ideas but she is careful to explain exactly how to do that and still plumb the depths of a writer's mind to get the inspirational juices flowing anew with each use.

I disagree with Wright on one point. She uses some captivating dialogue as samples for the first sentence in novels or short stories. Most writing teachers at UCLA's world-renowned Writers' Program warn writers not to open with dialogue; they consider it taking the easy way. I believe that authors who work hard will be able to come up with an opener just as intriguing as Wright's examples using narrative instead and, in fact, Wright provides one. No, I'm not going to give away that secret.

As the editor of the writers' site Writer2writer.com, Wright brings experience to Outside the Square Fiction Workshop, from her site as well as from her experience as the author of Saving Emma and innumerable other pieces. She is also the author of Think Outside the Square: Writing Publishable (Short) Stories, a perfect desk companion to Fiction Workshop.

The Book

Writer2Writer
2005
E-Book
0975672924
Nonfiction/Writing [How-To]
More at the publisher's site
Excerpt
NOTE: Five of Five (stars)

The Reviewer

Carolyn Howard Johnson
Reviewed 2005
NOTE:
© 2005 MyShelf.com