Almost anything you have an interest in these days, you probably can find a really effective how-to book on the subject. Just about everything has been covered by someone. If you want to learn how to garden or fish or program computers you could certainly take a class but if you just hop on down to your local bookstore or even look on the internet you are certain to find a text in which the basics will be covered.
Used bookstores can be a great source for how to books. For example, if you need to find a writing book how-to which I did recently, most any good used bookstore will have a plethora of different niche books on the basic subject.
There is a lot of variation on the writing book theme, I found. I could choose books on how to write job cover letters, journal writing books, essay writing books and so on.
I even found a writing book about how to write bad poetry. Of course the author thought this was funny and so it was mostly supposed to be a comedic experience, but I did find that if you were a person who never had thought of yourself as a poet, the book might loosen you up to the point that you felt more comfortable writing whatever silly “bad” poetry that came out of you.
What I really wanted was a new addition to my collection of writer’s exercises so I could have a variety of different approaches to pull out of my hat.
Although there are a couple of authors who write books along this line, as far as I could tell they almost have a niche market. There wasn’t much available that was new to me in the style I needed.
If you are looking for journaling books it’s a different story but I was hoping for exercises to inspire fiction writing.
It also seems that journaling books tend to go out of print, so luckily years ago I hoarded whatever I found then in used bookstores. They aren’t perfect for fiction writing per se, but if you have an imagination there are plenty of exercises in them that can be changed to be geared toward whatever type of writing you are trying to do.
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