Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook

LEARN HOW TO WRITE LIKE THE EXPERTS, FROM THE EXPERTS. Practical advice in a perfect package for young aspiring writers. After receiving letters from fans asking for writing advice, accomplished authors Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter joined together to create this guidebook for young writers. The authors mix inspirational anecdotes with practical guidance on how to find a voice, develop characters and plot,make revisions, and overcome writer’s block. Fun writing prompts will help young writers jump-start their own projects, and encouragement throughout will keep them at work.

This book is illustrated by the amazing Matt Phelan.

"Two fine writers put their heads together and come up with an equally fine guide to their craft for beginners."  - BOOKLIST 

Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook.

Two fine writers put their heads together and come up with an equally fine guide to their craft for beginners. Avoiding traditional chapters, the coauthors address issues by turns in short personal takes. Mazer speaks to beginnings, for example, while Potter tackles endings; and both have diverting things to say about everything that happens in between, whether it’s the narrative voice or (eek) writer’s block. Always agreeable, practical, and commonsensical in their approach, the two are also refreshingly permissive (“it’s fine to break rules”), though they add the caveat that rule breakage should come from a knowledge of said rules and a good reason for breaking them. Their text is enlivened with sidebar features, personal anecdotes, and suggestions to readers for exercising their new skills (happily these aren’t called “Exercises” but, instead, “I Dare You”). Such devices, along with the authors’ unfailing good humor, will go a long way to convincing their audience that writing can actually be fun! A notion that is nicely underscored by Phelan’s engaging and always appealing illustrations.

— Michael Cart (BOOKLIST)