The Playful Way to Serious Writing

Rating:
Summary: Write playfully!
Review: "The Playful Way to Serious Writing" is by Roberta Allen, the author of "Fast Fiction." In both books, Allen advocates the use of free writing in order to access your creativity. The idea is that you take a "prompt" or exercise of some kind, set a timer for 5, 10, or 15 minutes, and then write. This isn't the kind of writing where you plan and organize and outline--you just write whatever comes into your head and keep writing. This is supposed to help you turn off your inner critic and get down to the really creative stuff. In "Fast Fiction," Allen specifically applied this technique to the creation of the short-short story, and to the creation of longer pieces of writing from smaller building-blocks. In "The Playful Way to Serious Writing," she's sticking with the simple idea of just getting started and being creative, without worrying about what comes next.

Allen does a wonderful job of establishing a childlike tone to the book. The font is large and plain, and looks a bit like a child's handwriting. The sentences are short and direct, kind of like what you'd expect to hear from a child. Allen discusses events from her own childhood, and the prompts seem to evoke a child's curiosity and lack of understanding about the world. She talks about the energy that some words and ideas have, always capitalizing it ("ENERGY")--it seems a little bit silly, but again, it's the sort of thing you can imagine a child doing. This helps to establish a tone and sense of freedom--it helps to disable that inner critic so the child in you can come out and play without fear.

There isn't much to distinguish the prompts and exercises themselves from those in any other writing book (like Heffron's "The Writer's Idea Book," Shaw's "Writerrific," or Rekulak's "The Writer's Block"). But the tone of the book itself is certainly more conducive to helping us shed our serious, adult critic-minds and return to a more playful, childlike attitude. And this can be a handy thing for anyone having trouble tapping into their creative side. This approach isn't for everyone, but if it sounds like fun, you might enjoy this book!

Rating:
Summary: Cure for Writer's Block
Review: I have free-lanced as a comic book writer since 1997. The money has been alright, but what I have sought is the sheer, incomparable fun of making up stories, of having characters I made up come alive. Last year, I hit a dry spell. I could come up with decent ideas and force myself to write them down, but the fun, the magic, had disappeared. Everything I came up with was drab and contrived, the writing was mechanical, riddled with clichés and cardboard solutions. I didn't know what to do. My mood soured, slowly the world started turning to stone. One day in December I came across Roberta Allen's THE PLAYFUL WAY TO SERIOUS WRITING. From then on, things began turning around. Her book describes the most original and powerful cure for writer's block that I have found. Every day I'll do two, three exercises from the book to get me started, and sometimes I'll use the techniques to do the actual work. Most importantly, using her method, I have discovered that the juice, the magic, the white light, that special something that makes it all worthwhile, has returned.

Rating:
Summary: Energize your writing
Review: In this book, Roberta Allen says "pressure brings energy to the surface." The book explains how tapping into the energy of a moment is the key to bringing out the flow of writing.

The book has many photos and lines to stimulate response. It's an energizing book to read, and the kind that you stop reading so you can go write!

I've read and taught many writing techniques to get people writing and this book was a fabulous find. Though using a timer seemed unnecessary to do the writing, I tried the five-minute technique. The emotional energy I felt in a word, picture, or memory DID move the writing forward in a playful, yet productive way. This technique injects a gaming element into what could be a drudge.

I normally write non-fiction and poetry, but have never been able to enjoy writing fiction. Using this approach of "finding the energy" has energized my fiction process as I follow the energy to new action, characters, and scenes.