An excellent resource not just for teen writers, but for writers of any age. Offers help with pacing, dialogue, characterisation, world-building and a whole host of other elements of storytelling. Accessibly written, easy to follow and well laid out, it is entertaining and engaging. Using questions and exercises to help you develop the skills you will need to be a writer, it is a fun and practical course.

The Teen Writer's Guide: Your Roadmap to writing by Jennifer Jenkins is a great resource for beginning writers of any age to learn the basic principles of how to write a story. The book includes an example at the beginning of each chapter with a writing sample from Jenkins. Afterwards, she explains an aspect of the writing process she mentions and gives you some things to consider. The writing prompts were very useful to help come back to the main aspects of the chapter. I especially liked Chapter Four's focus on plotting.

Jenkins provides a lot of information in this book that beginning writers will need to know before they start writing their own stories. She also shows potential writing snags that writers may run into and how to avoid them. Multiple topics are covered such as characters, POV, world building, dialog, plotting, editing, getting published and so much more. She even includes a chart that aligns her questions to common core standards for educators who teach writing.

Overall, this is an excellent resource for all writers who are trying to learn the craft of writing their own stories. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is thinking about writing a book or who is currently writing a book but needs direction. A great addition to your home or school library.

I usually don't read non-fiction or self-help kinds of books but I've made an exception for this one because it's published by my all-time-favorite indie publisher, Owl Hollow Press. Much to my astonishment, this book provides some practical and useful tips regarding creative writing. I truly appreciate the descriptive demonstration of how to build the story structure, construct a narrative, and design a plot. To be honest, I never consider being a writer or at least try to create my own story BUT somehow after reading this book, I feel so motivated! All in all, this book is amazing and it's perfect for all the aspiring writers out there. Highly recommended!!

I liked the book. The stories in the beginning of the chapters were interesting and it was also interesting to get to know a little better how a writer thinks about her craft.
The prompts at the end of each chapter made me want to do them as an experiment to see how it would all turn out but I don’t have ever written a all book (I’ve written a thousand of beginnings because I like to write to help me think about things though) so it will have to wait.
Apparently, I have strong opinions about punctuation and writing in a passive voice that go against the author’s advice and that’s why I can only give this book three stars (I’m not a native English speaker so it may be that).

A very good book. Inspiring for aspiring writers of all ages, not just teens. Very readable, and useful advice. Highly recommended.

This is a wonderful book that I think is going to provide a lot of great young writers with useable advice. I think this is a great book for authors to pitch to young ones who always ask how to start writing. This is practical advice that will actually give teens the skills and passion to start their writing career.

I found this book most interesting, Very informative & insightful. Recommended whatever your age.. Some great exercises in the book which appeal to all ages, whatever your writing level and experience. Recommended.

I haven’t found creative writing resources for kids to be super helpful. My younger daughter took a creative writing class over the summer (mind you, she was nine, but still…) through our school district where the main takeaway was a list of words to use to replace “said.” She replied. She surmised. She grunted. She yelled. She mumbled. Except, you’re never supposed to do that. The word said disappears to a reader and everything else makes unnecessary noise. I told her this and she swore off writing classes forever. Often writing books for kids do the same thing. Give not great advice and dumb it down.

For that reason, I wasn’t expecting to love Teen Writer’s Guide: Your Road Map to Writing by Jennifer Jenkins as much as I did, but it’s the kind of book I wish had been around when I was a teen.
The book intersperses short stories from the author’s life with the concepts she’s explaining, then each concept—like characterization, world building, dialogue—has writing prompts and/or questions to help you flesh out your ideas. Nothing is dumbed down. There are a lot of challenging concepts in this book explained in a really easy-to-read manner. It’s also a book that as an adult, I found pretty helpful. There’s even a section on publishing and how to find an agent.

Jennifer Jenkins, the author, is a co-founder of Teen Author Boot Camp which sounds like such an amazing organization for teens. I would love for my daughter to be able to participate in something with them, but until we feel safe going to conferences again, I’m really glad a book like this exists!
Note: My older daughter, who’s been working on some short stories about LGBTQ+ identities, requested to be in this picture. I didn’t have to coerce her at all!

Thank you to @netgalley , @owlhollowpress , and the author for a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

If I had heard of Jennifer Jenkins before I think I would have gotten more from <i>Teen Writer's Guide: Your Road Map to Writing</i>, as at times it does read more like a biography than a writing guide. Brings a new meaning to the term 'write what you know'!

The advice given throughout is very simplistic, but it does what it says on the tin. If you're a young person who is just beginning to write and finds it quite overwhelming, this breaks down the different aspects of storytelling very efficiently.

I did keep getting annoyed by the 'Travel Log Notes' throughout, as they seemed to jump around all over the place and the majority of them were a little bit pointless. There was also one which claimed that in Great Britain all speech is written in single quotation marks with the punctuation outside, which is incorrect. Yes, we traditionally use single quotation marks over here rather than double, but the punctuation rules which she establishes (putting commas and question/exclamation marks inside the quotation marks) are still the same. 'Can you imagine if we wrote like this'? I asked myself. 'No, I can't, because we don't'. Forgive me if the meaning was lost in translation and she actually meant an example like the one I used in the first paragraph of this review, but this was the way that it came across and I found it mildly frustrating. I mean, Harry Potter is referenced - and quoted - fairly regularly in this book, so she could have just looked at those examples to check her knowledge.

I chose this book for review because I mainly felt like I needed to go back to my roots of when I originally planned to be a writer. It helped. Felt a bit cheesy at first but I got over it.

I really liked all the advice that was given in this book. It helped give a different perspective and improve on my writing.

This book is a good guide for young writers. When wanting to become a writer there are many things that this dreamer needs to know before reaching such a goal. The writer of this book strives to guide teen writers or dreamers to their goal. This book is designed in an interesting way as a road map giving a step-by-step guide to help young writers. I liked how she has designed the book in an easy to reference way. They are able to work on characters, story ideas and other elements of the writing world including publishing. Even grammar is mentioned with help, which is important and great to have in such a book as well.

Teen Writer’s Guide is a tutorial instruction manual by educator Jennifer Jenkins. Released 24th March 2020 by Owl Hollow Press, it's 171 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a logically presented accessible guide full of writing prompts which are engaging and when worked through will give the fledgling writer a good technical background, developing a specific writing skill set which they can then turn on their own stories.

Each of the chapters includes specific examples from the author/instructor which she then deconstructs with notes on nuance, language selection, description, and more. She carefully and clearly elucidates the potential traps and snares and how to avoid them.

The author defines the terms throughout and although they begin at an introductory level (what's a protagonist, antagonist, tension, story arc, stereotype) they are all very well defined in a manner which is never condescending to the reader.

The author also includes specific information for educators/facilitators. She provides some guidance for age groups (6th - 12th grades) with regard to the common core writing standards and applicable content in the book. This would make a superlative support text in a classroom setting as well as a workbook for individual study. Although written for teen(ish) readers, there are valuable takeaways here for new writers of all ages.

Five stars. Well written and informative.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I teach creative writing for teens and am always looking for resources to recommend to my students. The Teen Writer's Guide covers all of the essentials of writing fiction (whether short stories or a novel), including world building, characterization, plotting, tension and tips on editing. I especially enjoyed the connection that was drawn between writing dialogue and text messaging: "Communication is messy and messy is interesting." However, there are a few sections devoted entirely to grammar tips, which (although useful) may not appeal to the teen writer as much. Jenkins includes excerpts from her own writing throughout the book as examples. While they are useful in illustrating her points, I found that the excerpts often broke the flow of the text and outnumbered the actual writing prompts.

An informative guide for teens and people of all ages who want to write.
Brilliantly presented with clear and helpful information designed to encourage and motivate people to write, no matter where in the process they are.

This book breaks down the same areas I teach in all my English classes - setting, character, plot. I believe I could use this in my classroom as a springboard for writing lessons.

Students will appreciate the mentor texts that go along with the theory of writing.

This was an ok book gave the info needed and helped with writing, But it fell flat for me. Yes it gives you all the info but its missing some very basic stuff you can get for free at say a night class or even youtube

TEEN WRITER'S GUIDE: YOUR ROAD MAP TO WRITING by Jennifer Jenkins is a resource that I will definitely be recommending. Jenkins, an educator and co-founder of Teen Author Bootcamp, clearly understands and communicates well with teens. She uses a very conversational tone and plenty of personal examples to pull them into thinking about writing. Each chapter offers some simple exercises and I think this could potentially be a great book for a summer read (or remote learning?). It seems that it could be used at a relatively individualized pace, while still providing opportunities for class discussions and peer feedback. Each chapter (some discuss choosing your audience, character development, world building, or dialogue, for example) ends with a summary and an exercise or two to help aspiring writers take their story ideas further. Generally, these involve essential questions from the chapter (what is your character's greatest weakness, strongest desire, stereotype, etc.) and a journaling task. Later chapters include valuable points about grammar, sentence structure, and even getting published. Jenkins says, "my hope is that this book inspires your students to color outside the lines, challenge basic ideas, and discover a deeper level of creativity."

I know, I know – I haven’t been a teenager for rather a long time. But when it comes to writing advice, there’s a lot to be said about this kind of straightforward, no-nonsense advice. I might have double the years, but I got a lot from this.

Interspersed with lots of samples of her own writing, used to illustrate the topics, Jennifer Jenkins takes us on a trip from the idea stage to publishing, via characterisation, tension, world building, and more.

None of the advice is exactly ‘new’ or startling, but it’s very well presented. I particularly liked the chapter on dialogue – not just the nuts and bolts (e.g. where punctuation goes) but so many useful examples on mixing speech and action. I’ve been reading writing advice for a long time now, but this might be the best ‘show don’t tell’ guide I’ve stumbled across!

Kudos to the author for presenting the writing journey with as much humour and encouragement as well as useful tips. The target audience doesn’t mean it’s dumbed down, just missing a lot of superfluous waffle – I think a lot of adult wannabe writers will get just as much from this as kids!

The basics of writing are laid out in story format in this book. I believe it's target audience is 9th/10th grade and would be beneficial to that age group. I am one of those writers who like to go into the table of contents and constantly reference things I want and I can't do that with this book. The table of contents states the chapter with topic and each chapter is followed y a specific writing prompt. There is no breakdown beyond this and I think that may have been useful.