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 Reviewer |
Carolyn Howard Johnson |
Reviewed 2005 |
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