10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Teaching Book, May 1, 2000
This review is from: The Writer's Path: A Guidebook for Your Creative Journey : Exercises, Essays, and Examples (Paperback)
This book not only offers excellent writing exercises, it also includes the authors' examples so you can get a feel for how to make best use of the techniques described. I especially enjoyed the biography data sheets which help you to better understand your characters (or yourself!). This is a "teaching" book. Here, do this, it says, but goes on to show you how, step by step, which many books don't bother to do. The Writer's Path will keep you busy, entertained, and hopefully, writing better and better pieces.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So many reasons to use this book, March 13, 2001
This review is from: The Writer's Path: A Guidebook for Your Creative Journey : Exercises, Essays, and Examples (Paperback)
The Writers Path is a not just about writing. It is also about reflections, healing and connecting to oneself and others. It serves not only the seasoned and blossoming writer, but also those looking for a sensitive structure to explore personal insight and creativity through writing.
As one who teaches a college class about the creative process as well as being a creative arts therapist I have found invaluable tools in the Writers Path. The exercises, essays and examples help students and clients alike connect with their spirit, their story. We all have a story to tell. Creativity is a great healer. Having methods of tapping into it though writing has proved insightful and therapeutic for my students and clients who claim "they are not writers". They have explored some of the techniques in the Writers Path to create some profound and touching stories.
I was first attracted to the book because I wanted toexpand my writing skills. I was pleasantly surprised to find it so divers in its application. It should be on every creative writing class syllabus. Those looking for creative group process ideas will find them in this book. Walton and Toomay present a beautifully written guidebook for ones creative journey.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best how-to for any kind of writer and writer-to-be, July 7, 2002
This review is from: The Writer's Path: A Guidebook for Your Creative Journey : Exercises, Essays, and Examples (Paperback)
Everyone, anyone will benefit from this book--beginners and masters, productive and blocked writers, literary and technical writers. The authors' premise is that everyone can write, has a unique voice, and has something to write about. Instead of poking us in the eye with rules and have-to's and shoulds--like so many English teachers seem to--Walton and Toomay, both accomplished writers, draw us out, help us discover, and encourage us. They do this through exercises: some to do alone, some with a writing partner; some take a few minutes, some longer; some simple, some difficult. I found them all useful. Well, I haven't tried all of them--there are probably hundreds of them including all the variations.
A convenient feature of the format in "Writer's Path" is that you can wade into the book at any point and pick the exercise for whatever skill you want to work on, then come back later for a different exercise. Like Yoga, you don't need an elaborate set up; you can do an exercise jotting on an envelope while you wait for the bus or during a dull meeting. Some are simple enough to do in your head, although I've found it best to write--that's the point of the book--to have a record of what I've done and, at best, to see in time the progress I've made. Many exercises are like improvisational skits--as in Drew Carey's show, "Who's Line is it Anyway"--where rehearsed performance is replaced with on-the-fly invention. Creative--sometimes silly--exercises such as changing one word at a time or reordering sentences help loosen imagination and foster creativity even if the result of an exercise isn't a finished product. To help make the exercises work, they've provided examples of results of most of the exercises. But they don't hold up the examples as models, just as guides. One of the best aspects of this book is that it draws writing out of us rather than pushing us to fit a mold. In that respect, this book inspires and encourages, and may be especially good for people who consider themselves refugees from hypercritical English instruction. As Toomay points out, one of the differences between taditional instruction and "Writer's Path" is that the former focuses on the product of writing, and the latter focuses on the process of writing. Better process necessarily improves the product, yet avoids the necessity for criticism in favor of practice practice practice. (As in the old joke, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?)
Although the subtitle--"A Guidebook for Your Creative Journey"--suggests it's for fiction writers, the help "Writer's Path" provides is applicable to any kind of writing because Walton and Toomay show us how to master the thinking, ideas, and psychology underlying written work as well as the mechanics. It could just as well have been titled, "The Psychology of Writing" or "Writing as Experience."
Primarily a technical writer, I have found the exercises useful in finding new formats and approaches to old problems. While there are no characters or plots in my papers, the exercises on those elements have helped me to think of the usual analysis or reporting instead as storytelling, and, I hope, to understand better how readers can relate to my topics.
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