Review: Writing Advice for Teens: Creating Stories

Title:  Writing Advice for Teens:  Creating Stories
Author:  Mike Kalmbach
Genre:  Nonfiction/Language
Publisher:  n/a
Release Date:  April 24, 2012
File Size/Pages:  1049 KB/174 pgs
Source:  Bought

My Rating:  5/5

Summary:  When all you have is a blank page, it's often tough to begin writing.  Writing Advice for Teens: Creating Stories aims to help you overcome that initial hurdle by making it easy for you to write down simple, focused ideas and craft them into stories.  However, coming up with ideas is not enough. Teen writers need to understand basic story structure so they can avoid typical writing problems.  Filled with plenty of tips, advice, and examples to help any teen writer, the first book in the Writing Advice for Teens series focuses on getting ideas down quickly and pounding out that first draft. After following the advice and using the techniques outlined in this book, you should understand how to bring the stories locked in your mind to the surface.

Review:  Get rid of all your writing books, because this is the only one you’ll ever need; well, this and the other books in the series!  There were so many things that were touched on in this book, and it made so much sense after I read it.  For example, saving your work daily, via emailing it to yourself or saving it to a flash drive as opposed to depending solely on the file saved to your computer.  There were exercises, tips on battling writer’s block (yes, it does exist), and even a character sheet that you can print from the website.  As someone who has used millions of character sheets, this is the only one you’ll need; it’s five pages and very detailed...every author needs it!  Although this book is targeted to teens, I’d recommend this series to any writer, young or old!