Writer's Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great [Paperback]

Jack Heffron (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2003

This title helps writers assess their ideas and grow them into finished pieces. It includes more than 300 creative exercises and aims to show readers how to: be more creative; complete more projects; rescue stalled projects; break through writer's block; and use writing time more productively.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jack Heffron is a freelance writer, editor, actor and teacher. His short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and his nonfiction has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader, and ESPN's Total Sports Magazine among other. He has taught writing for more than 17 years and is the author of The Writer's Idea Book and co-author of Writer's Guide to Places. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Writers Digest Books (September 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582972796
• ISBN-13: 978-1582972794
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Playfulness Coupled with Logical Questions and Prompts, March 14, 2004

By 

Julie Jordan Scott "Writer, Life Coach - Owne... (Bakersfield, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Writer's Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great (Paperback)

I saw the title of this book and thought, "Oh, man...... most of the writers
I meet are deluged with ideas and weak on delivery of those ideas
so what good is a book like this one?!"

Poor initial assessment: I am always glad to see when my initial take
is proven WRONG by a well crafted book!

Jack Heffron writes with a friendly, knowledgeable tone which serves
as an inspiring companion. Not just that, he writes in a way that makes
you think "Hmmmm, this guy must be a working writer -- he writes
in a way that you KNOW he knows first hand what you experience
when you meet the keyboard day after day.

He also tells you upfront what to expect (no "inner child" talk) and
is very organized and logical in his approach. I wanted to applaud
when I read "Don't use this book or any other as a substitute for
writing."

Followed by -- "Explore the idea on the page...." oh, yeah, that's right... it
is a book about WRITING. Not a book simply TALKING about

writing or considering writing or discussing writing.

Each chapter has at least ten prompts (excpet chapter 3 inexplicably
has 9!)

I also enjoyed Chapter 4 -- Stoking the Fire -- which did not include the
usual "Questions to Consider" section, instead advising the reader/
writer "For now, don't ask the questions"... WRITE! (A little bit
of Rilke thrown in for good measure?)

Finally, I would be remiss to not mention the chapter
"Stuck in Revision"..... glorious application of "Ideas" in an area
where as a writer I can become completely comatose.

This one is worthy of not only a purchase, its worthy of a long
time companion both on your shelf and open on your desk.

ENJOY!

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn from the best!, April 23, 2004

By 

H. Grove "Errant Dreams Reviews" (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Writer's Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great (Paperback)

This is a follow-on to "The Writer's Idea Book." That book was mostly about mining everyday life for ideas, using a plethora of writing prompts. "The Writer's Idea Workshop" takes you to the next step--turning those ideas into saleable writing.

While you can find many of the suggestions here in other books on self-editing, you'll also find advice that moves in new directions. There's a section on how to apply other people's suggestions to your own work that talks about the ways in which you can dig through surface-level criticism to get to the really helpful information underneath it. Many of Heffron's prompts in the section "Mining for Diamonds" focus on various ways to look at a piece of writing, pick out what's working and what isn't, and go from there.

Do you want help generating ideas? Evaluating your ideas? Making them serve the greater needs of your specific writing projects? What about using them to help you overcome various problems you'll encounter while writing--such as difficult beginnings, stuck middles, and troubled endings? The book follows up its instruction with helpful questions you can ask yourself, and expands on those with prompts and exercises to help you apply what you've learned to a specific piece of writing.

This book has a lot more practical information in it than the "idea book", and it's more versatile. It isn't meant for the seasoned pro, but novice and intermediate writers can learn a lot from it. My only minor gripe is that, in the beginning of the book, Heffron has developed a world-weary tone that focuses not on the wonder of writing, but rather on the mistakes that apprentice writers tend to make over and over again. In some ways this is good--he spends plenty of space on concrete suggestions and prompts meant to help you spot and conquer these issues. On the other hand, it's less inspiring and uplifting than the tone he takes in his previous book.

This is a wonderful book that could help most writers to improve their writing. Heffron is such a fixture in the editing world that you'll find his name somewhere in most of the writers' books out there--he really knows what he's doing, and he's sharing that valuable information with us.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Place for Unformed Ideas, January 28, 2006

By 

Thomas Hunt (Oklahoma City, OK United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Writer's Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great (Paperback)

Heffron offers, in this text, a great chance to explore and strengthen the ideas that you have floating around in your head, homeless and unformed. He offers numerous exercises and creative approaches to harnessing your natural instincts about the nature of what you want to write in order to create better fiction and non-fiction. His approaches work. I have produced better work because of him. But more importantly, I saved those ideas I was unsure of what to do with and built on them. What might have been lost to uncertainty, bloomed on the page. I appreciated his conversational approach in his chapters. He pulls you in and makes you comfortable. He offers sound advice and speaks from a place of authority. I highly recommend this book.