Jack Heffron

Jack Heffron is an American writing teacher, editor, and author best known for The Writer's Idea Book, the prompt-driven craft reference that has helped tens of thousands of writers generate, develop, and finish projects since its first edition. He was a senior editor at Writer's Digest Books and at Story Press, and was a founding editor of Story magazine, which won the National Magazine Award twice during his tenure.

The Writer's Idea Book (first edition 2000, tenth anniversary edition 2011) is built around more than four hundred writing prompts and exercises that target every stage of the work: initial idea generation, getting unstuck in the middle of a draft, finding the real subject buried inside a stalled story, and choosing an ending that earns the reader's trust. The book treats prompts not as gimmicks but as structured ways to interrogate the writer's own life, memory, attention, and curiosity. It is widely used in MFA programs, undergraduate creative writing courses, and writing groups.

Heffron edited The Best Writing on Writing anthologies for Story Press and contributed to multiple other Writer's Digest titles on craft and the writing life. His own fiction and essays have appeared in literary magazines, and his writing has won numerous awards. He currently teaches in the journalism program at the University of Cincinnati and continues to lead workshops on writing craft and idea development.