Customer Reviews

Live Writing: Breathing Life into Your Words

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

 

 

Ralph Fletcher has written a trio of fantastic books for young writers. "A Writer's Notebook" is about gathering material; "How Writers Work" is about the process of writing; and "Live Writing" is about craft, or how to write well. Most importantly, these three books are written directly to kids, in a warm and personal rather than "textbook" manner. I don't know of any other author who writes books on writing for kids, and this genre is so needed! Plus all of Fletcher's books are very engaging and well-written.

Fletcher selects what he feels are the most important aspects of craft for this book. My notes on some of them follow:
Characters
· Characters are the most important part of a story.
· The plot should grow out of the characters, and not the other way around.
· Characters must first be born in your mind.
· Build characters from people you know.
· Give physical descriptions of your characters.
· Characters should be complex, containing both good and bad.
· Write letters to and from your characters, asking them questions!
Voice
· Best way to develop it is through your writer's notebook.
· Think of writing as chatting on paper.
· Always have a particular audience in mind.
· Be honest!
· Writing is trying to get readers to see something as you do.
Conflict
· Types of.
· Don't wait long to develop it.
· Don't solve it too quickly.
· Don't end a story too abruptly or predictably.
Time
· Writing time isn't the same as real time.
· Slow down "hot spots."
· Skip over unimportant time quickly.
· Narrow the time frame to key points.
· Flashbacks are usually needed; they represent memories, what makes a character tick.

This easy to understand book is good for writers of all ages. I have used lessons from this book to help my middle school and high school students improve their writing. Fletcher concentrates on specific aspects of writing, like leads or characters, and uses simple but powerful examples that implicitly show students how to improve their writing. If you are using a workshop class, many of his ideas lend themselves to effective mini-lessons.

This is a light, easy-to-read small book summarizing the important ideas for young creative writers.

The author gives published examples of most of his creative writing recommendations. The book is short but was well worth the price of the paperback version ($5 retail).

Although the target seems to be young writers, I found many interesting quotes and passages to digest and underline.

And although I think of this book as a little 'lightweight' I keep going back to browse through it.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

I think everyone should go and buy this book. It is worthy of 5 stars.This book trys to help you become a better writer by sharing some of Ralph Fletcher's experiances. If you like this book I reccomend you read Spider Boy or A writer's notebook. ( The book before Live Writing)

I read excerpts of this book to my at-risk secondary students and they really enjoyed hearing about how to make their writing more full of life. It really brought the writing process to their level and helped them internalize the importance of writing.

This book helps teach a person how to bring the characters off the page. The title says it all. It helps you to "Breath Life Into Your Words." Words are just words. We use words all day everyday, it's how you put the words together that determines what emotions they will convey. However, there is a big difference in conveying emotions in the spoken word and conveying emotions in the written word. Without emotions in the written word, the words are flat and uninteresting.

This book is written for teens, therefore it is generally straight forward. I love that the author tells the kids, "I have to work at writing." It is good for them to understand that almost nobody just sits down and writes and gets it right the first time.

This short book intended to improve elementary writing skills contains several fine pieces of advice for the aspiring writer of fiction. Fletcher has designed this advice for children and filled the book with writing samples from kids ranging from forth to eighth grade. The sections covered include elements of plot, setting, character development, dialog, conflict, and a writer's voice. If you are a child or have children seeking to unlock their hidden writing talents, Live Writing is a qualified selection to begin with.

The book Live Writing is a basic "toolbox" for young writers. It shows different methods on how to enhance your writing, by giving you tips on grammar, topics,organization, starting out, etc. It also is an ideas index for writers in progress. For example the author talks about how he was trying to write poems, but his baby kid wouldn't stop crying and screaming, so instead of getting frustrated and giving up he decided to write poems about his baby crying. He also gives various ideas on how to make writing more interesting or to "juice it up and give it electricity".

There are no characters in this book, only short poems and stories about various people showing his "more interesting" writing methods. They also have surveys on young writers about writing stories. For example, the author asked a fifth grader what the hardest part of writing a story is, and he said the beginning, so there is a chapter about how to write a beginning. Also, at the end there is a short story displaying all of the author's strategies on writing.

Live Writing is probably one of the worst books I have ever read. The language and verbs he used to try to make his book more interesting made it even more obvious that he was trying too hard at catching our attention. What I don't understand is why his intended audience was young adults, the writing seems like it was intended for 3 year olds. Even then at some level it must be a bore to read. Reading it was the worst experience, I don't know which made me fall asleep faster, the topics on chapters or the cheesy lingo. You can tell the author wanted to help young adults write better, but it didn't help me or my classmates. In short, this book was the worst book I've ever had to read.

Have you ever read a book that you hated so much that you never wanted to set eyes on it again? Well I have and I want to tell you a little about it so that you don't have to go through the misery of reading it, like what I had to go through. The book I am talking about is called Live Writing, the book was written by a man named Ralph Fletcher. It is about how to write inspiringly. The author uses something called a "tool box" to explain how to create great writing. The whole book is filled with tips and short stories that a writer should add into their "tool box". Though Ralph Fletcher did have a purpose in writing this book (to help children write well), he didn't make his point well, while writing the book. This book had no point at all in it, and is a big waste of time to read.

Live Writing doesn't exactly have characters in it except in the short story in the end, or you could include the quotes in and it that appear throughout the endless pages of waste. The author himself is the narrator of the whole book, so he is a character in himself. Throughout the book Fletcher mentions characters in his poems and people who had given him his inspiration for example Carolyn Coman he talks about her and her books and how she is one of his favorite writers, but otherwise there weren't many characters. The fact of there not being many characters, makes the book worse already.

While I was reading the book Live Writing I couldn't concentrate one bit on what I was reading, because of all the dullness that the book was filled with. Also while reading the book, I came to realize something else I didn't like about the book and that was the style in which it was written in. There was no variety in the writing and there was absolutely no suspense of a sort. In the book Ralph Fletcher try's to make writing fun but he doesn't succeed in doing that. If he made his book more fun and adventures then it would be an al together better book. Live Writing was and is the worst book I have ever read and this is why I would recommend it to no one in the world. This is also why you should never waste your time like I did just to read this terrible book.