Writing - Jamie Cat Callan - The Writer's Toolbox (2007)

I think this is the first writing book I'm reviewing. You may not know this, but I have a ton of these things. Not boxes full of stuff. I only have two of those.

Except for this blog, regrettably I haven't written for a while. It was my job, and also the wedding, and also my depression and anxiety. But now I'm unemployed, married, and on Celexa, so I figured it was time to stop with the excuses.

And if you have writer's block, this is fucking amazing.

The book inside is a scant 60 pages long, but it's mostly an instruction manual for the goodies inside the box, which include Popsicle sticks, a deck of cards, a three-minute hourglass, and spinning palettes you would otherwise think are more suited to kids learning their addition or times tables.

But they aren't normal items. The Popsicle sticks have first lines on them, lines to start new scenes, and even something to spark the conflict in a story. The cards have ideas and senses on them, so you can dive into description or use one as a starting off point. The palettes have protagonists, their goals, what's standing in their way, and how they try to get around that. All in all, it's a pretty robust set of inspiration tools for any stuck writer hoping to fill a notebook with some ideas to mine through later.

I used some of the tools as I read through the manual. I ended up with a guy setting his family's home on fire while hallucinating that they are actually all going on a vacation together, three female roommates that secretly and not-so-secretly hate each other, and an older guy trying to reclaim his youth through sex with younger women. This, after not really writing for months.

The great thing about book itself is that it doesn't just explain the tools in the box and give crappy examples of how to use them. It describes how to use each tool to start a new story, start back into a half-finished one, and even how to combine them more than just "sticks go together, cards go together".

I mentioned earlier that I have a lot of these kinds of books. One thing that this one does, and I love, that none of the others do, is show some examples of using the tools by other authors. Short little vignettes followed by commentary by the author describing their thought process while writing. That was super cool. And the vignettes are enough to inspire you to pick up your pen and start on using the tools yourself.

Not bad for a box I picked up on a whim to use a coupon.

9.5/10