Book Review: Writer Mama by Christina Katz
Buy this book. It doesn’t matter if you’re a guy or a girl, a parent or a pet owner. Christina Katz leads you step-by-step toward writing a novel from ground zero. And she does it in manageable chunks that help you build your writing career around other responsibilities.
Katz starts you by providing ideas to help you pick your areas of expertise and translate them into writing niches. She has you begin with submitting tips and takes you through progressively longer and more complex writing projects until you are submitting a novel.
The chapters are short and concise, and the design lends itself to easy skimming. If you get distracted, it’s easy to find your place on the page because of the liberal use of color and subheads. It isn’t often that you see a design that fits the concept behind the written word quite this well.
If you have already done tips, list articles, and how-tos, it is easy to skip those chapters and move on to the types of stories you are ready for. However, you will miss the exercises embedded in each chapter. The exercises are the most valuable portion of the book. If you don’t have the mindshare to quickly apply the lesson to your own life, the exercises help you create that context.
I checked this one out of the library, but I’m buying my copy later today!
Edited to add: Christina Katz has a website with more info about her book and a blog. She has a nonfiction workshop coming up Jan. 10 in the Portland, Oregon, area.
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Categories: Uncategorized, writing