Customer Reviews

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

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

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.

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.

Like with many other things in life, I just couldn't decide whether I liked this book or not ;). On the one hand Heffron does a wonderful job of keeping the reader's interest with personal accounts and advice. But then on the other hand the many prompts filtered throughout the book became a bit of a drag, as it required you to stop reading to do long activities.

One practical idea that Heffron stresses is playfulness and simplicity. Returning to the reason you want to write-because you love it! Writing itself is a form of expression, and a form of creativity. What you will write, if it truly comes from you, even if it is a mixture or combination of your experiences or relationships with the outside world, it still will be unique, because these factors are unique to you. Therefore Heffron says that you must not worry about beginnings and endings and rational things like structure and form, those will fall into place in time, and prematurely worrying about them will only serve to clog your creative senses. Instead he says you should return to your youth, and essentially treat the process like you are a kid playing in a mud puddle. "Splash around and play," and let yourself explore your idea without any reservations.

With its many techniques and practical suggestions, I think this book is wonderful for those who are struggling writers, or struggling to be writers. It contains a wealth of information and ideas for innovating manuscripts at all stages-from idea formation to editing the final draft. I think it can also prove to be useful for other types of writing as well, such as articles and research papers. This is because no matter what, a reader is looking for information in an interesting comprehensive yet simple manner. Therefore many of the different techniques and prompts highlighted throughout the book will definitely help to stretch the creativity of someone who might be writing something in a more constrained or dry setting.

Overall a fun book that can certainly be read and reread and applied practically.

"The Writer's Idea Workshop" Is a neccessary accompaniment to the "Writer's Idea Book". It offers a number of different methods to develop a particular idea. I reccomend this book.

For me this is a book that you read through and put on/in bookshelf. Great as a reference tool!