Writing Advice for Teens: Creating Stories

by Mike Kalmbach

Overview

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.

Contains 21 exercises to inspire and refine story ideas!

Perfect for use in:

• high school English or creative writing courses
• homeschool creative writing or homeschool English courses
• writing seminars

Back cover text:

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984654536
Publisher:	Mike Kalmbach
Publication date:	04/15/2012
Series:	Writing Advice for Teens , #1
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.39(d)
Age Range:	13 Years

About the Author

Mike Kalmbach has a Master of Science degree in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. Moonlighting as a freelance editor, he has worked with numerous full-length manuscripts as well as countless short stories.

He also leads the Rochester Minnesota Writing Group and is a founding member of the Rochester Writers Collaborative. He is a strong believer in the power of community and has led online writing groups and forums for over ten years.

Mike lives in southeast Minnesota with his wife, son, and two cats. He can also often be found via Twitter or his blog.

Editorial Reviews

This writing guide provides practical information and exercises to make the intimidating world of writing more accessible to aspiring young authors. In this manual, fiction and nonfiction writer Kalmbach (The Caldarian Conflict, 2011) gives detailed, structured long- and short-term writing goals for inexperienced writers who want to become more disciplined in their craft. It includes valuable information about online tools and websites that help facilitate the writing process, as well as useful word-count guidelines and character sheets. The author also offers suggestions for dealing with the various distractions that can confront the contemporary teenage writer. While the book gives premature, sometimes excessive publishing information for such young writers, it wisely emphasizes the importance of receiving feedback from fellow writers and creating an encouraging writing community. Each chapter includes helpful idea-generating exercises, tips, writing samples and personal anecdotes. The author's familiar tone is often welcoming, but in several instances, he makes awkward, strained attempts to be hip and relevant: He frequently tries to capitalize on the vampire trend in YA fiction, while references to wizardry, specifically the Harry Potter series, are recurrent yet out of touch. Also, the importance of avoiding cliché is not sufficiently addressed. In fact, some of the writing samples seem to encourage overt sentimentality. In a description of a cherished bookend, for example, he writes, "As a sign of my mother's love, I'll treasure it forever." Toward the end of the book there's also a somewhat arbitrary moral lesson about the dangers of drugs. More relevant advice, though, is the emphasis on reading, meeting deadlines and reaching quotas to eventually create a large, diverse body of work. A distracting preoccupation with being culturally relevant doesn't prevent this guide from offering realistic, creditable advice.

Kirkus Reviews