Book Review – Use Your Words – A Writing Guide for Mothers

Use Your Words – A Writing Guide for Mothers

Written by Kate Hopper

This is a book for both beginning mother writers and more advanced writers who want to take their writing to the next level. Kate Hopper is widely published in The Star Tribune, Literary Mama, Redbook, and The New York Times. 

Use Your Words introduces the art of creative nonfiction to women who want to give written expression to their lives as mothers. Written by award-winning teacher and writer Kate Hopper, this book helps women find the heart of their writing, learn to use motherhood as a lens through which to write the world, and turn their motherhood stories into art. With the approach that creative writing can be taught, each chapter of Use Your Words focuses on an element of craft and contains a lecture, a published essay, and writing exercises that serve as jumping-off points for the readers’ own writing. Contributors include Anne Lamott, Anne Greenwood Brown, Lucinda Cummings, Chitra Divakaruni, and many more.

Have you ever wished you could write about motherhood but just don’t know how to get started? Or maybe you’re just not sure you can really do it. Then this may be the book you need. Kate Hopper takes you step-by-step from “getting started” through “putting it all together”. She shows you how to expand on your thoughts, making your writing a product that others would want to read.

Every chapter has a writing exercise to help you get your words down on paper. Here’s an example from Chapter 1.

WRITING EXERCISE: A MOMENT IN TIME

Think of a moment with your child or children that you do not want to forget. Write for 15 minutes and try to incorporate as many sensory, concrete details as you can. Where are you? What does the room look like? What are you doing? Be as physical in your description as possible.

What is my opinion about Use Your Words? I think it is a great tool for mothers that want to write creative content about their lives and their children, whether you blog, want to publish magazine articles, or write a great book. It is a well-written guide.

However, I don’t feel it is a good fit for a blogger such as myself. My blog is a more diverse blog about many different topics. It would be great for mommy bloggers who write almost exclusively about motherhood.