Excellent book for budding writers

So...the writing is going well for me so far this year, yay one NY resolution that hasn't been kicked hastily to the curb yet! It's the 9th January so obviously a long way to go and hopefully many words to be scrawled yet.

I just wanted to share a brilliant book that is really helping me along the way. I have vowed to myself on many previous occasions to do a little writing a day. Just 5 minutes. But it's strangely difficult to pick up a pen and just write about something, anything, everyday. I never succeeded...until I found this book.

"The Write Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing" is so easy to use. I opened the book on 1st January 2012 so have resolved to complete one page per day for the next year (plus 11 extra for good measure).  Each page has a five minute writing task, and they are genuinely fun tasks. The point is not to write some amazing literature, but to just write whatever comes to mind and free up your pen. It unsticks you, and if some story ideas come out of that too...then great. You cannot get stuck as there are prompts of all sorts to send you on your way. Each page gives you a task or theme and then even an opening sentence to get you started. At the bottom of each page is a small text box with 'Take the Next Step' written in it. Each next step is a short additional exercise aimed particularly at honing in on, getting to know, motivating and waking up your writing self. These little boxes ask what it is you want from your writing self in different ways so that eventually you can build up a picture, a focus and a visualisation of what you would ultimately like to achieve.This was yesterday's page:

Each page is presented creatively with space to write on the given topic. Another thing helping to keep me going is that I can't wait to have a full book at the end of the year, with words in old-skool pen that I wrote every day. It will be a nice diary of sorts to look back on.

So if anyone is interested, I strongly advise you to invest in a copy...also makes a great gift.