Exploring My Ideas

Ten Short Stories Followed by the Author's Shared Ideas with a Simple and Practical Guide How to Explore and Compose Ideas into Short Stories

Fiction - Short Story/Novela
106 Pages
Reviewed on 10/03/2018
Buy on Amazon

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Author Biography

Fida Abbott is an award-winning author. Her book, Enthusiasm, received a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award from the National Association of Book Entrepreneurs in 2010. She was a 2011 winner of 50 Great Writers You Should be Reading, presented by The Author Show.

Fida was born and raised in Indonesia. With her husband and daughter, they live in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where she expresses herself in her writings in English and Indonesian.

Fida is the director of an online writing course, www.pelatihanmenulis.com , as well as KabarIndonesia, an online Indonesian news, based on the citizen reporter, and a certified Defense Language Instructor for Bahasa Indonesia, serving USAF.

For more information, you can visit www.abbottsbooks.com.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite

Exploring My Ideas: Ten Short Stories Followed by the Author's Shared Ideas with a Simple and Practical Guide How to Explore and Compose Ideas into Short Stories is a collection of short stories and an educational guide for writers by Fida Abbott. Abbott is an author and writing instructor, who was born and grew up in Indonesia. She sees her stories as a way to express and share her experiences, feelings and thoughts, and she shows aspiring writers how they can do likewise with their own stories. While the conventional wisdom is to write what you know, Abbott demonstrates how writers can use written material and their imaginations to make other realities vivid enough to base a story on. She concludes each of her short stories with a section that gives “the story behind the short story.”

Fida Abbott’s short story collection and writer’s guide, Exploring My Ideas, is a well-written and thought-provoking book that analyzes and breaks down the writing process for new writers. Abbott’s voice is conversational and informative, and reading her book felt a lot like having her directly interacting with me as I read. I loved the supernatural aspect of The Rent House which was inspired by her own experiences with a haunted house. In Makeup Makeover, the reader is immersed in the world of a preteen whose first experiment with makeup transforms her into Elsa, the Snow Queen from Frozen. Abbott also includes a worksheet for creating and categorizing your story ideas and a chapter entitled Ten Guides to Plot a Short Story that analyzes in detail a short story from her collection. Exploring My Ideas is highly recommended.

Janelle Alex, Ph.D.

Exploring My Ideas: Ten Short Stories Followed by the Author's Shared Ideas with a Simple and Practical Guide How to Explore and Compose Ideas into Short Stories is exactly what it claims to be - a compilation of short stories created by Fida Abbott, as well as her explanation of how people can think critically and write their own stories. Abbott starts off by sharing a bit of her personal story around writing the stories before sharing the actual stories themselves. Interestingly enough, each of the ten stories has a “story behind the short story above” section at the end of each tale. The overall concept of Exploring My Ideas is unique.

As each story is quite short and easy to read, Fida Abbott offers a number of fun, quick reads to enjoy from an entertainment perspective and as examples of how readers can follow her methodology and write their own stories based on their personal experiences. A drawback of Exploring My Ideas might be that it’s only five chapters long and the chapter concepts don’t flow all that well. The chapters jump from the introduction to an entire chapter with all of the stories and the final chapter being the guide to publish one’s own stories. However, the concept is excellent. The guide in chapters three through five is more like a mini-workbook to help readers and Abbott even uses one of her stories as an example of how to use her questions and guide. Fida Abbott’s Exploring My Ideas could be a great little book for inexperienced young writers. Good effort.