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Anatomy of Genres
A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story, John Truby.
Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren't just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That's why businesses--movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses--buy and sell them. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories these businesses want to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres. The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is the legendary writing teacher John Truby's step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or "beats," that define each of them. As he shows, the ability to combine these beats in the right way is what separates stories that sell from those that don't. Truby also reveals how a single story can combine elements of different genres, and how the best writers use this technique to craft unforgettable stories that stand out from the crowd. Just as Truby's first book, The Anatomy of Story, changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world.- Please log in to review this product
Associated Press Stylebook
The style of The Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing. With the AP Stylebook in hand, you can learn how to write and edit with the clarity and professionalism for which their writers and editors are famous. The AP Stylebook will help you master the AP's rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, word and numeral usage, and when to use "more than" instead of "over." To make navigating these specialty chapters even easier, the Stylebook includes a comprehensive index. Fully revised and updated to keep pace with world events, common usage, and AP procedures, the AP Stylebook is the one reference that all writers, editors and students cannot afford to be without. This edition contains more than 300 new and revised entries, including:
- A new chapter on inclusive storytelling: its importance and how to achieve it.
- Detailed guidance on writing about people with disabilities and disabled people.
- Many updates on immigration, the coronavirus, gender and race-related coverage, including the capitalization of Black and expanded use of singular they.
- A revised chapter on religion, with guidance on when Catholic rather than Roman Catholic should be used on first reference.
- A thoroughly updated chapter on using social media for reporting.
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Crafting the Personal Essay
- Ways to step back and scrutinize your experiences in order to separate out what may be fresh, powerful, surprising or fascinating to a reader
- How to move past private "journaling" and write for an audience
- How to write eight different types of essays including memoir, travel, humor, and nature essays among others
- Instruction for revision and strategies for getting published
Brimming with helpful examples, exercises, and sample essays, this indispensable guide will help your personal essays transcend the merely private to become powerfully universal.
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Have You Eaten Grandma?
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How to Write Like a Writer
The New York Times bestselling author of the beloved classic How to Read Literature Like a Professor teaches you how to write everything from a report for your community association to a meaningful memoir in this masterful and engaging guide.
Combing anecdotes and hard-won lessons from decades of teaching and writing--and invoking everyone from Hemingway to your third-grade teacher--retired professor Thomas C. Foster guides you through the basics of writing. With How to Write Like a Writer you'll learn how to organize your thoughts, construct first drafts, and (not incidentally) keep you in your chair so that inspiration can come to visit.
With warmth and wit, Foster shows you how to get into (and over) your best self, how to find your voice, and how to know when, if ever, a piece of work is done.
Packed with enlightening anecdotes, highlighted with lists and bullet points, this invaluable guide reveals how writers work their magic, and reminds us that we all--for better or worse, whether we mean to or not--are known by what we put on paper or screen, both our thoughts and our words.
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Howdunit
Ninety crime writers from the world's oldest and most famous crime writing network give tips and insights into successful crime and thriller fiction.
Howdunit offers a fresh perspective on the craft of crime writing from leading exponents of the genre, past and present. The book offers invaluable advice to people interested in writing crime fiction, but it also provides a fascinating picture of the way that the best crime writers have honed their skills over the years. Its unique construction and content mean that it will appeal not only to would-be writers but also to a very wide readership of crime fans.
The principal contributors are current members of the legendary Detection Club, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter James, Peter Robinson, Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Elly Griffiths, Sophie Hannah, Stella Duffy, Alexander McCall Smith, John Le Carré and many more.
Interwoven with their contributions are shorter pieces by past Detection Club members ranging from G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr to Desmond Bagley and H.R.F. Keating.
The book is dedicated to Len Deighton, who is celebrating 50 years as a Detection Club member and has also penned an essay for the book.
The contributions are linked by short sections written by Martin Edwards, the current President of the Club and author of the award-winning The Golden Age of Murder.
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I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * New Yorker * Sunday Times (UK)
From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity--and how it saved her life.
In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Jami Attenberg--described as a "master of modern fiction" (Entertainment Weekly) and the "poet laureate of difficult families" (Kirkus Reviews)--reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one's ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?
As the daughter of a traveling salesman in the Midwest, Attenberg was drawn to a life on the road. Frustrated by quotidian jobs and hungry for inspiration and fresh experiences, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually on travels around the globe. Through it all she grapples with questions of mortality, otherworldliness, and what we leave behind.
It is during these adventures that she begins to reflect on the experiences of her youth--the trauma, the challenges, the risks she has taken. Driving across America on self-funded book tours, sometimes crashing on couches when she was broke, she keeps writing: in researching articles for magazines, jotting down ideas for novels, and refining her craft, she grows as an artist and increasingly learns to trust her gut and, ultimately, herself.
Exploring themes of friendship, independence, class, and drive, I Came All This Way to Meet You is an inspiring story of finding one's way home--emotionally, artistically, and physically--and an examination of art and individuality that will resonate with anyone determined to listen to their own creative calling.
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In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF 2022 (Air Mail)
Four new and revelatory essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter.
In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as "an oracle among authors." Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.
Here is a subtle yet candid book by "one of the great novelists of our time" about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.
"Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante's name on it."--The Boston Globe
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Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators
In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction.
Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers' Association and series consultant to the British Library's highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars.
The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative - and readable - study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors - from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell - into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.
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Murder Your Darlings
With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Stephen King would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics -- Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself?
Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer Prize winners alike for more than thirty years, has compiled a remarkable collection of more than 100 of the best writing tips from fifty of the best writing books of all time.
With a chapter devoted to each key strategy, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for writers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.
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No Time to Spare
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
"The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them. . . " -- Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review
From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts--always adroit, often acerbic--on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.
Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: "If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."
On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"
On breakfast: "Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime."
Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula's blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: "How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us."
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Novelist as a Vocation
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Novelista
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On Writing (and Writers)
"While writing about writing is often deadly, Lewis is as delightful as he is wise." --The New York Times
A definitive collection of wisdom on every style of writing and a celebration of the transformative power of the written word from one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the modern age, C. S. Lewis, the beloved author of the Chronicles of Narnia series, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and other revered classics.
Featuring over one hundred excerpts--some short and some essay length--drawn from his wide body of letters, books, and essays, On Writing (and Writers) brings together C. S. Lewis's reflections on the power, importance, and joy of a life dedicated to writing.
Writers and devoted readers will be enriched and inspired by Lewis's commentary on a range of genres, including:
On Good WritingOn Writing FictionOn Writing PoetryOn Writing for ChildrenOn Writing Science FictionOn Christian WritingOn Writing PersuasivelyOn Other WritersWise and practical, On Writing (and Writers) reveals Lewis's thoughts on both mechanics and style, including choosing adjectives, the art of expression, how to connect with readers, and the core principles of clear, impactful writing.
A window into the mind of one of the greatest public intellectuals of the twentieth century--a gifted writer whose influence and insights remain relevant six decades after his death--this engaging collection reveals not only why Lewis loved the written word, but what it means to "gladly teach" the art of writing, so that wise readers can "gladly learn."
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On Writing and Failure: Or, on the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer
Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.
Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer's life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid's exile and Dostoevsky's mock execution to James Baldwin's advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.
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Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
From lauded writer and teacher Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done is encouraging and intensely practical, focusing always on specific rewriting tasks, techniques, and activities for every stage of the process. You won't find bromides here about the "the writing Muse." Instead, Bell breaks down the writing process in three sections. In the first, Bell shares a bounty of tactics, all meant to push you through the initial conception and get words on the page. The second focuses on reworking the narrative through outlining, modeling, and rewriting. The third and final section offers a layered approach to polishing through a checklist of operations, breaking the daunting project of final revisions into many small, achievable tasks. Whether you are a first time novelist or a veteran writer, you will find an abundance of strategies here to help motivate you and shake up your revision process, allowing you to approach your work, day after day and month after month, with fresh eyes and sharp new tools.
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ROOMS WOMEN, WRITING, WOOLF
From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind
Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they'd turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.
Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virginia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one's own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.
How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.
"With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolf's famous 'room' with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyras's memoir testifies to Woolf's continuing generative power."--Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2011) and author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021)
"In this beautiful, perceptive book, Sina Queyras moves deftly between the words and wake of Virginia Woolf and their own formation as writer, lover, teacher, friend, and person. Rooms is expert in its depiction of personal and literary histories, and firmly aware of its moment of composition. Reading these pages, I was enticed by Queyras's curiosity and openness, thrilled by the sharp edges of their anger. Tight prose, electric thinking, self-discovery - it's all here, all abuzz. Rooms is alive." - Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
"It is impossible not to question the world as we thought we knew it by the end of this book. Sina Queyras painstakingly aims their extraordinary nerve and talent at Virginia Woolf's idea of a room of one's own: 'It's a mistake to consider the room without all of its entanglements.' Taking Woolf's cue, Queyras explores writing that is not world-building but something far more generous and transformative; as Woolf wrote, 'Literature is open to everybody.'" - CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration
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Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
"Delightful." --Mary Norris, The New Yorker
A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world's most polarizing punctuation mark
The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?
In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples--from Milton's manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letters from Birmingham Jail" to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep--Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we'd think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language.
Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don't need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.
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Story Cure: A Book Doctor's Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir
all levels. His hard-hitting handbook provides inspiring solutions for diagnoses such as character anemia, flat plot, and silent voice, and is peppered with flashes of Moore's signature wit and unique take on the writing life.
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Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.
Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design. In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to--people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a "reminiscent montage" from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes's yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee's singular planet.- Please log in to review this product
Tell It Like It Is
With Clark's trademark wit, insight, and compassion, Tell It Like It Is offers a uniquely practical and engaging guide to public writing in unprecedented times--and an urgently needed remedy for a dangerously confused world.
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Write for Your Life
How would you create a winning pitch for your latest investment idea? Or persuasively argue for a major policy change? Or successfully ask your boss for a raise? The answer: clear and effective communication, whether in writing or through a presentation.
Best-selling author Charles Wheelan has spent decades mastering effective communication skills in his work as a writer, college professor, journalist, speechwriter, political candidate, and public speaker. In Write for Your Life, he shares his best tips. Taking readers through all the steps required to arrive at a coherent first draft, he then explains the best ways to improve and fine-tune your writing. He covers how to organize and present information, why it's necessary to adapt your tone to different audiences, and when to use summaries, sidebars, bullet points, and other tools for making information more digestible. He explores the truth behind popular clichés like Show, don't tell and Kill your darlings, and discusses the proper use and attribution of quotations from secondary sources. And he goes on to cover how to speak effectively, providing helpful advice for preparing a winning presentation or delivering a speech.
Writing with his signature wit and humor, Wheelan illustrates his points with entertaining examples from his own life, as well as memorable anecdotes from leading magazine and newspaper writers, political figures from Winston Churchill to Barack Obama and Elena Kagan, and a diverse array of the best communicators from the worlds of culture, sports, and politics. Write for Your Life is an essential guide for anyone needing to get their ideas across whether in an email, memo, report, presentation, fund-raising letter, or speech.
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Write for Your Life
What really matters in life? What truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this lyrical new book, the answer is clear: through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls "civilians," those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves. Write for Your Life argues that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future--from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today--Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential. When we write we not only look, we see; we not only react but reflect. Writing gives you something to hold onto in a changing world. "To write the present," Quindlen says, "is to believe in the future."
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Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer's Guide to Telling Your Story
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