Customer Reviews

One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft

5 star:		(16)
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3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
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If you're mindful of how today's extreme pull on your time leaves little room for nurturing a creative life, this book offers a very grounded and realistic way in which to cultivate one. And it shows you how to do it in a way that's methodical, possible, and simple. As you reflect on the author's suggestions, you'll find yourself observing inwardly and outwardly and asking yourself more centered, elegant questions about your life's images and symbols. Susan Tiberghien's book allows those of us with only slivers, not swathes, of time to become full travelers on the inner safari. This is a book that offers a writing process of effective 10-minute sound bytes rather than a list of commands requiring an afternoon. What's more, it's just plain FUN without the feel of heavy lifting. I found myself wanting to go deeper and find the center when I tried focusing on only one image in the journal entry exercises. This is a book about mindfulness as much as it is about writing. Much praise and thanks for this book that makes writing so doable!

This is a wonderful book. I have been using One Year to a Writing Life as a textbook this semester in my Creative Writing course. The book is very well conceived so my syllabus follows the twelve lessons, week by week, with extra weeks for longer in-class writing. The book provides clear guidance, great examples and it inspires! It inspires me to both teach and write and it inspires my students. Before I chose One Year to a Writing Life as a textbook for my class, I surveyed many texts that are on the market and not a single one comes close to this great book. Thank you, Ms. Tiberghien, for helping all of us who write and who teach writing. Jelena S. Bankovic, Ph.D.
Professor of English, Oakton College, Illinois

I had been working on a personal essay for a couple of weeks. As I rewrote it, I used the chapter on personal essays in One Year to a Writing Life as a check list, and saw my essay becoming richer as a result.

I submitted the essay to a publication whose submission information said they would take 4 - 6 weeks to get back to me. They accepted it within 12 minutes of receiving it!

I will be recommending this to my writers' group members.

Susan M. Tiberghien draws upon her years of experience and expertise as a veteran writing instructor, writers' conference speaker, and graduate school lecturer in "One Year To A Writing Life: Twelve Lessons To Deepen Every Writer's Art And Craft". A gifted writer in her own right, Susan Tiberghien covers journal writing, personal essays; opinion and travel essays; short stories (included the 'Short-Short'); dreams and writing; dialogue; folklore, fairy tales, and contemporary tales; poetic prose and the 'Prose Poem'; memoirs and biography; rewriting; and more. Of special note are her chapters on 'The alchemy of Imagination' and 'Writing the Way Home'. Enhanced with a specialized bibliographies and a comprehensive index, " One Year To A Writing Life" is as informed and informative, as it is inspired and inspiring -- making it strongly recommended reading for all novice writers and aspiring authors.

For example: location 903, she wants you to draw circles, but she calls it something else, and suggests putting an image in there and let it fill your mandala etc. and do other stuff with visualizations. In another location 913, she want you to have a conversation with another image, or have a dialog with your images and let them coach you or speak to you. There is other stuff in there about unconscious guiding you to patterns, and stuff about dreams, and labyrinths, and alchemy. This is really where it starts to enter the twilight zone for me.

I found the technical stuff on essays, and dialogue, etc., very helpful. However if I knew the whole book had this new-agey type overtone, I would not have bought it. Nevertheless I found it useful for the technical aspects of writing.

For the last seven months, since I suggested our writers' group work, learn & write our way through Susan Tiberghien's One Year To A Writing Life, our group's commitment has solidified with each chapter of her book. Each bi-weekly meeting finds the six of us (writers, poets, academics)gathered to read & review our exercises from each chapter, copies for all and with reference to Tiberghien's "text". Recently, as a response to the growth in our writing and our awareness of that growth, we have re-committed to returning to particular chapters so that we may explore them once more in even greater depth, based on both the pleasure of the process and our personal learnings as writers. As the convener of our group, I would suggest a group approach to One Year To A Writing Life is an ideal
process to apply to Susan Tiberghien's wise & illuminating guidance.

Tiberghien's new book on the writing life is a must read for all writers, at any stage of writing, embracing the Creative Mosaic in both our life experience of dreams, journals, prose poems, memoirs and envisioned by noted published literary ones. The richness and thoughtful spirit of these twelve lessons is inspiring and meaningful as any mentor could recite prayers of meditative instruction. I have been a student of
Tiberghien's workshops; here's the five-star creme de creme.

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I have only been using this book for two days and it is already starting to help with my writing. It had showed me new ways to open up my creativity and get my imagination going. I think it's a very practical and very helpful approach on writing that you can do every day or once week. I would suggest it for anyone who enjoys writing, whether you're a beginner or have been writing for a long time.

I learned more from this book than from years of writing classes. The author distills the essential elements of writing, from journal-inspired pieces to nonfiction to fiction to folktales to poetry. She writes in a very clear and helpful way. But - do not buy this on Kindle. You will regret it. It's the kind of book you need to flip between pages. Biggest problem: the Kindle version has an comprehensive index, but there are NO PAGE NUMBERS! I think the technology of the device has gotten ahead of designing texts for e-books. I could have paid less than a dollar more to get the paper version, which I will now wish I had.

This is the best book I've read yet on writing instruction. And I've read a lot of them. She has basically put a writing course in a book and filled it with terrific lessons and excellent examples, not just platitudes and feel-good statements about how you too will be a writer in ten easy steps!

I felt as I read through it that I will actually get somewhere with my writing. I'm not saying that I thought I'd magically become a published author at the end of a year. Instead, I felt like I knew what she was talking about in her instructions because of the clear descriptions backed up by great examples.

A huge plus in the book is that she covers so many different types of writing working through journal writing, personal essays, opinion and travel essays, short stories and the short-short, dreams and writing, dialogue, folk, fairy and contemporary tales, poetic prose and the prose poem, and memoir. She includes checklists for rewriting and editing. It is a treasure trove for beginning writers as well as experienced writers.

I read this book straight through for a couple of different reasons. I had already begun it earlier and gotten bogged down by the first drawing exercise and decided to make it part of my 50 books for 2010 so that I would never get back to it again because I believed this book had much to offer that I'd never find if allowed to sit on a shelf. Also, I wanted to try something new with this particular instructional book and not just begin with instructions. I wanted to try blasting through the work and see what it had to offer before doing the work and I discovered that I may try that from now on. Seeing how much great stuff lies ahead, I cannot wait to go back and dive into my writing actually utilizing her techniques. (Though I admit that the drawing exercises may still bog me down!)