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365 Tips for Writers
Inspiration, Writing Prompts and Beat The Block Tips to Turbocharge Your Creativity

By Dawn Colclasure

Call Them Tips if You Want To
A Small Book of Advice (and Counsel) for Writers


   365 Tips for Writers: Writing Prompts and Beat the Block Tips to Turbocharge Your Creativity by Dawn Colclasure benefits from the author’s experience as a poet. A poet must know something about inspiration and Dawn has been inspired enough to write two chapbooks, Take My Hand and Topiary Dreams.

   Coclosure not only knows something of inspiration, she also knows the value of brevity. 365 Tips is more a book of advice than tips. Nevertheless, the word “tips” works because each is so short and very sweet. She uses few words to say much. This too, is so like a poet.

   With a foreword written by the promotion guru of Web-fame, Peter Bowerman, this little volume gets off to the right start by providing the reader with sound credibility. Bowerman is taken with the variety of tips in this book as he well should be. There is no subject that Colclasure doesn’t cover. Everything from writing dialogue to what she calls BEAT THE BLOCK TIPS--a subject that tends to worry (nay, consume) most writers.

   Tip #166 seems to fit well with Dawn’s writing philosophy. “Shorter is better,” she says. This book is about 154 pages in the reviewer’s copy she provided me with. Still it is packed with enough tips for a writer to read and savor one tip a day for a year. That’s a lot of learning and a lot of sharing.

    I believe Tips will be valued most by writers who are just beginning, but seasoned writers may enjoy mulling over ideas as a refresher course.

   365 Tips goes one step farther than needed by also including a CD so that writers can listen to the nuggets it provides. Repetition is valuable when we’re learning. At each step in our writing process we are ready to hear advice differently. Poets are experts at knowing this too. They know about alliteration, verses, refrains. I enjoy opening this little volume anywhere, just to see what serendipity it might provide for me each day. It can be summed up as a little I Ching for writers. Writers looking for an inoculation of good old writing expertise will enjoy this little volume whether they prefer my approach, decide to read it from front cover to back or choose to pop that CD. This is one book that lets you “have it your way.”

The Book

Filbert Publishing
2004
format
1932794107
Nonfiction/Reference/Writing
More at Amazon.com

Website

NOTE: Includes CD

The Reviewer

Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Reviewed 2005
NOTE: Carolyn Howard-Johnson, is the award-winning author of “This is the Place”, “Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered” and “The Frugal Book Promoter: How to do What Your Publisher Won’t.”
© 2005 MyShelf.com