Susan M. TiberghienCritiques

This is the best book I’ve read yet on writing instruction. And I’ve read a lot of them. She has basically put a writing course in a book and filled it with terrific lessons and excellent examples, not just platitudes and feel-good statements about how you too will be a writer in ten easy steps!

I felt as I read through it that I will actually get somewhere with my writing. I’m not saying that I thought I’d magically become a published author at the end of a year. Instead, I felt like I knew what she was talking about in her instructions because of the clear descriptions backed up by great examples.

A huge plus in the book is that she covers so many different types of writing working through journal writing, personal essays, opinion and travel essays, short stories and the short-short, dreams and writing, dialogue, folk, fairy and contemporary tales, poetic prose and the prose poem, and memoir. She includes checklists for rewriting and editing. It is a treasure trove for beginning writers as well as experienced writers.

I read this book straight through for a couple of different reasons. I had already begun it earlier and gotten bogged down by the first drawing exercise and decided to make it part of my 50 books for 2010 so that I would never get back to it again because I believed this book had much to offer that I’d never find if allowed to sit on a shelf. Also, I wanted to try something new with this particular instructional book and not just begin with instructions. I wanted to try blasting through the work and see what it had to offer before doing the work and I discovered that I may try that from now on. Seeing how much great stuff lies ahead, I cannot wait to go back and dive into my writing actually utilizing her techniques. (Though I admit that the drawing exercises may still bog me down!)

Tiberghien started writing when she was 50. This is a one-year progression through a writer's craft based on many workshops she has taught in Geneva, Switzerland.