Kate Grenville is an award-winning Australian author, with the prestigious Orange Prize under her belt for The Idea of Perfection. Her latest novel, The Secret River, won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and was shortlisted this year for both the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award.

Kate has been a creative writing instructor both in Australia and in the United States, and also has degrees from universities in both countries. The Writing Book is based on her courses and the insight she has gained from coaching her students.

I’ve never been fond of using writing prompts as warm up exercises, so I initially skimmed through the first part of The Writing Book where Kate offers a number of different exercises for generating story ideas. These range from writing about what you see, hear, feel etc, where you are currently sitting to writing about a recent dream.

I started paying attention, however, when Kate pulled all these seemingly unrelated prompts together and showed explicitly, by using her own results, how arbitrary pieces of writing could be collated into a convincing short story. Later on in the book, she reprints the short story that was written from these same pieces, which, albeit after many rewrites, was published in an anthology. The crux of this method is generating all these pieces of writing in the same session because, while they may be unrelated, they capture the same mood and atmosphere throughout.

So, I have to admit to being impressed by this process as a means of generating short stories in a relatively quick and painless way. And I’ve learnt something I certainly didn’t expect to. If you have a contest coming up, you may well find this very useful. If you’re working on a long-term novel, though, it is less likely to be helpful. The various pieces generated from these writing prompts are simply too insubstantial to sustain a full-length novel. It can, however, still help to break writer’s block by working your writing muscles in a different way.

Kate covers most of the standard aspects of fiction including characterisation, dialogue, point of view, and description. Along with the prompt exercises, each chapter contains examples from the works of critically acclaimed writers, illustrating the nuances of the craft that Kate describes in that chapter.

The final chapter covers submitting stories for publication, debunking some of the traditional myths like fame and fortune, and includes brief comments on formatting and other considerations.

If you’re wanting to invest in some solid writing practice in order to improve your craft, or generate plenty of rough drafts for entering short story contests, this book is ideal. Breaking down elements of the literary work available and comparing the writing with your own practice works is very helpful for building an understanding of how good fiction is constructed.

You can read an extract of the first chapter of The Writing Book on Kate Grenville’s website.

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The Writing Book by Kate Grenville is available from Amazon.com