Jump Start: How to Write From Everyday Life

by Robert Wolf

For years, Robert Wolf traveled around the Midwest and the South teaching small town folk, farmers, and homeless individuals to write about their lives through poems, essays and fiction. Through his own small publishing company, Free River Press, Wolf published these stories of the forgotten parts of America. In 1999, Oxford published an anthology of his students' works in a volume entitled American Poetry and Prose by Everyday Folk .
Now, we have Jump Start --a concise guide that offers Wolf's writing techniques from his Free River Press workshops across the country. Rooted in the oral tradition, Wolf's methods include storytelling, visualization, spontaneous prose composition, and sketching. Useful for both the individual and groups as well as for beginning or practiced writers, his concrete techniques are flexible enough to be applied towards any form (poetry, composition, non-fiction, plays, etc.). With the inclusion of writing samples from past workshop participants, Wolf's main emphasis is that people from all walks of life, even with no previous background in writing, may produce meaningful and memorable work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 26, 2001

About the author

I spent about 50 years criss-crossing America, living in 10 states and and in humungous cities like New York and Chicago, as well as small towns and villages like Duran, New Mexico (when I was 19 and rented a shack for $10 a month). My goal was to know America fully and to that end I wanted to work every job in the country and have conversations with everyone. I've been a newspaper columnist, a teacher in an inner-city school, a college teacher, a ranch hand, a writing instructor, a dishwasher and busboy. I have used all these experiences in my novels, plays, nom-fiction, and poetry. At 82 I've had a rich life.

Reviews

[Nancy Cook-senn]

Good, basic nuts-and-bolts tips for beginning writers, with illustrative examples and exercises to encourage creativity and practice.

[Sarah]

I just started this book -- hoping it inspires me.

[Shishir]

Good writing tips