Customer Reviews

Writer's Workshop in a Box

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This could have been very interesting. Many excellent books are written that are based on other people's ideas about writing - not the author's. One comes to mind : Walking on Alligators. Although to be fair, the Alligators's author does add her own comment and "affirmation" and those are just as important as the corresponding writer's quote.

Note that the author of the Writer's Workshop in a Box has only written a preface to the tiny book The art of Writing. Every 6 chapters are excerpts from such books as The Artist's Way and Beyond The Words.

There are many problems with this "workshop in a box". One is the packaging : the cover is beautiful, but deceptive. Inside the box, which is more like a book that you open, and which contains many slots, for everything that it contains, well... everything is a disapointment. The notebook is ugly, not at all like the cover, not sylish, more like very out of style, the pen is a very plain one, and the selection of excerpts found in The Art of Writing manual are from books that I have already read. Everything is gray/sepia, all washed-out.

The author selected excerpts from Cameron, Goldberg (Bonni), and Maisel's books. I suggest that you go to the sources, read Beyond The Words by Bonni Goldberg (an excellent book, you can find it for a few bucks in stores that sell books that have been returned to the publisher), read The Artist's Way, read Becoming a Writer. Buy yourself a less narrow notebook which you can open flat more easily, buy yourself a good pen, and forget about any book that wants to workshop you the whole nine yards about writing fiction and non-fiction in 96 small pages, and taking its lessons from the great "masters of writing like Julia Cameron".

The cards are too big to shuffle, and made out of thin cardboard that isn't treated (glossied, plastified), meaning that any humidity will ruin them. On one side is an ugly photo (by one of two unknow photographers, probably friends of the author) in sepia, and on the other side is a suggested activity. Some are good (but not original), such as write first thing in the morning each day for a week, and others are original but won't work for me, such as be attentive to commercials seen on tv and make out a story based on a commercial you find intriguing. There are 30 cards.

There are better gimmiks out there : The Observation Deck, the Autobiography Box (this last one is so cute, but I never used it). There's even a book on I Ching for writers coming out soon, that you can pre-order. It's too bad that there is no "search in the book" or any preview pages to look at. I know that the cover is beautiful. It is great design, really nice. The description is tempting, there are even some rare reviews out there (from obscure sources) that don't seem to trash this merchandise product. Resist.

PS : There is one delightful book you could get now, that you probably don't have already : No Plot, no problems! Not even gimmicky, it is unpretentious, fun, and very encouraging.