Augustus Johnson) Professor Victoria Winterhalter Brame, Ph.D. suggests that beginning writing students would benefit greatly by employing strategies used by successful writers in their writing process in addition to the methods currently taught. Through interviews and research, Brame discovered that most successful authors do not use the traditional strategies currently taught. This inspired her to determine what techniques these writers used in their writing process. Brame gathered and summarized techniques used by successful authors and determined that the writing process could be placed in three categories: “courting their muse, generating their ideas, and crafting their text.” (42). This was opposed to the current strategies, “prewriting, drafting, revising and editing” currently taught. Carrying a notebook, finding your space and drawing inspiration from a memory are some of the techniques that comprise courting your muse, strategies alluded to by Natalie Goldberg in her essay Engendering Compassion, Doubt Is Torture and A Little Sweet. Generating ideas includes making maps, scrapebooking and visiting sites as ways to set the scene. Storyboarding, Skipping around and reverse-outlining are useful methods for crafting your text for writing, revising and editing. Brame tested her premise that students would greatly benefit by using some of the techniques used by a successful writers by establishing a baseline with her current students. The baseline included knowledge and use of successful authors techniques and the students writing capability at the start of the course. Brame encouraged the use of the author’s methods and found an increase in the use of the new techniques along with an increase in the writing capability of the students at the end of the course. The most popular strategy used by the students was freewriting. Based on observations, Brame concluded that the use of techniques employed by successful writers not only benefited students but also increased their use of traditional methods such as outlining their thoughts. Student’s positive responses to the application of the new techniques further endorsed Brame’s proposals. Brame describes the favoured techniques as creating a writing space, freewriting and making a map. One of the author’s favorite books in developing the essay was How I Wrie: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann.