Customer Reviews

Families Writing

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a real gem of a book. I love reading and writing. I teach English as a foreign language, and I have dipped into this book time and time again for ideas and inspiration. This book has lots of excellent ideas for using writing to communicate between generations within a family and how to build communities of writers, or just how to have fun with various writing games. Author Peter Stillman is clearly a good writer himself: unpretentious and perspicacious, with a great sense of humour which is never far from the surface, especially in Stillman's own pen drawings; yet the tone is sometimes moving (as in the letter the author penned to his recently deceased father). A profound book that examines the power and value of communicating via writing.

Many writers remember getting praised for a writing effort when they were young. This inspired them and turned them into lifelong writers. This book gives plenty of ideas to start families, young and old, to get to writing. Many of the activities are suitable for a classroom setting as well. Think of journals, poems, memory books, stories and many other writing opportunities. This book has 65 ways of getting everyone into the writing mode.

I'm not sure what I was expecting but more than I got at least. The book itself seems outdated and the ideas were for me, non-starters. I was disappointed though I'm sure there are several who really fell into sync with the book. Not badly done it just didn't trip my writing trigger.