From the National Book Award-winning, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Let the Great World Spin and Transatlantic comes a passionate and practical book of advice, as essential for budding writers as Stephen King's On Writing 'A warm, open-hearted paean to the joys of writing' Sunday Times 'Excellent ... cannot fail as a pick-me-up' Observer I hope there is something here for any young writer - or any older writer, for that matter - who happens to be looking for a teacher to come along, a teacher who, in the end, can really teach nothing at all but fire. From the critically acclaimed Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, comes a paean to the power of language, and a direct address to the artistic, professional and philosophical concerns that challenge and sometimes torment an author. Comprising fifty-two short prose pieces, Letters to a Young Writer ranges from practical matters of authorship, such as finding an agent, the pros and cons of creative writing degrees and handling bad reviews, through to the more joyous and celebratory, as McCann elucidates the pleasures to be found in truthful writing, for: 'the best writing makes us glad that we are - however briefly - alive.' Emphatic and empathetic, pragmatic and profound, this is an essential companion to any author's journey - and a deeply personal work from one of our greatest literary voices.

This is a book about discovering how you do creative writing. How you begin, how you structure, how your writing process works, how a work embodies movement and change, what influences you, and, ultimately, how you end. Discovering Creative Writing points you toward clues that can assist you in understanding your own creative writing as well as the creative writing of others. This book is both a practical guide and a critical examination that empowers the reader to find things out and use that information to develop and support their own creative writing. This book will enable students of creative writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level to deepen their understanding of their practice, and will be a valuable guide and inspiration for anyone wishing to begin, continue, or improve their writing.

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of the best lyric essays published in the last several years by prominent and emerging writers. Editors Zoe Bossiere and Erica Trabold situate this anthology within the ongoing work of resistance-to genre convention, literary tradition, and the confines of dominant-culture spaces. As sites of resistance, these essays are diverse and include investigations into deeply personal and political topics such as queer and trans identity, the American BIPOC experience, reproductive justice, belonging, grief, and more. The lyric essay is always surprising; it is bold, unbound, and free. This collection highlights the lyric essay's natural capacity for representation and resistance and celebrates the form as a subversive genre that offers a mode of expression for marginalized voices. The Lyric Essay as Resistance features contemporary work by essayists including Melissa Febos, Wendy S. Walters, Torrey Peters, Jenny Boully, Crystal Wilkinson, Elissa Washuta, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and many more. Their work demonstrates the power of the lyric essay to bring about change, both on the page and in our communities.

University literary journals allow students to create their own venue for learning, have a hands-on part of their development in real-world skills and strive towards professional achievement. But producing an undergraduate literary magazine requires commitment, funding and knowledge of the industry. This practical guide assists students and faculty in choosing a workable structure for setting up, and then successfully running, their own literary publication. Whether the journal is print or online, in-house or international, Creating an Undergraduate Literary Journal is a step-by-step handbook, walking the reader through the process of literary journal production. Chapters focus on: defining the journal; the financial logistics; editing the journal; distribution; and what could come next for a student writer-editor after graduation. The first book of its kind to offer instruction directly to those running university-based literary magazines, this book includes insights from former editors, advisers, students and features an extensive list of active student-run literary magazines key literary organizations for writers/ editors who serve literary publications. From Audrey Colombe, faculty adviser on the award-winning Glass Mountain magazine from the University of Houston, this is a text for both newcomers and those more informed on the production process to help them navigate through a successful publishing experience.

#1 New York Times bestselling author and Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart has written a poignant and instructive guide for all aspiring graphic memoirists detailing the tenets of artistry and story-telling inherent in the medium. Hart examines what makes a graphic memoir great, and shows you how to do it. With two dozen professional examples and a deep-dive into his own story, Hart encourages readers to hone their signature style in the best way to represent their journeys on the page. With clear examples and visual aids, The Art of the Graphic Memoir is emotive, creative, and accessible.

Writing About American Literature, the latest addition to Karen Gocsik's popular "Writing About" series, is an accessible, step-by-step guide to writing about literature, from active reading to final revisions. The only writing guide created with American literature students in mind, this new text understands that active reading is the first step towards producing quality assignments and sections devoted to reading analytically and interrogating sources provide students with this essential foundation. Tips on reading critically and creatively, generating ideas, narrowing a topic, constructing a thesis, structuring an argument, and revising lead students through the entire arc of the writing process.

An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg.
Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In "Several Short Sentences About Writing," he sets out to help us unlearn that "wisdom"--about genius, about creativity, about writer's block, topic sentences, and outline--and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

Anxious to write that Great American Novel but don't know where to begin? Help is on the way with our "Writer's Block" This guide to beating writer's block comes packaged in the shape of an actual block: 3" x 3" x 3," with 672 pages and more than 200 photographs throughout. Next time you're stuck, just flip open "The Writer's Block" to any page to find an idea or exercise that will jump-start your imagination. Many of these assignments come straight from the creative writing classes of celebrated novelists like Ethan Canin, Richard Price, Toni Morrison, and Kurt Vonnegut: Joyce Carol Oates explains how she uses running to destroy writer's block. Elmore Leonard describes how he often finds ideas just by reading the newspaper. E. Annie Proulx discusses finding inspiration at garage sales. Isabel Allende tells why she always begins a new novel on January 8th. John Irving explains why he prefers to write the last sentence first. Fresh, fun, and irreverent, "The Writer's Block" also features advice from contemporary editors and literary agents, lessons from the awful novels of Joan Collins and Robert James Waller, a filmography of movies concerning writer's block (e.g., "The Shining, Barton Fink"), and countless other surprises. With this chunky little book at your side, you may never experience writer's block again

Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author's new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights. Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book's drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry. With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.

** An accompanying journal to the original & bestselling Almanacs by Lia Leendertz.** The Almanac Journal is a place for you to create your own personal almanac, starting and ending at any point in the year. This is a space to write down all of the things you notice about the year's turning, and your own reactions to it. There are pages where you can note all of the firsts: first swift, first rose, first frost; a place to squirrel away your favourite foraging locations - and to jot down the recipes you create from them. There are also pages for pressed flowers and seaweeds, sketches and pictures, feathers and drying leaves. Make it your own. Lia Leendertz is an award-winning garden and food writer, her reinvention of the traditional rural almanac has become an annual must-have for readers eager to connect with the seasons, appreciate the outdoors and discover ways to mark and celebrate each month. PRAISE FOR THE ALMANACS 'Indispensable' - Sir Bob Geldof 'The perfect companion to the seasons' - India Knight 'This book is your bible' - the Independent 'An ideal stocking filler' - The English Garden 'I love this gem of a book' - Cerys Matthews

Asked to name their ideal job, more people in the UK say they would like to be an author than anything else. Yet with more than 200,000 books now being published here a year and over two million worldwide, the competition is getting fiercer by the minute. As editor in chief of a successful self-publishing house, Chris Newton spends most of his waking hours editing and ghostwriting books for other people, and he knows all about how books can go wrong and how they can be put right. He is also a successful published author, one of his books having been acclaimed by a professional reviewer as having 'a good claim to be the finest biography of an angler ever written'.

Mind-game films and other complex narratives have been a prominent phenomenon of the cinematic landscape during the period 1990-2010, when films like The Sixth Sense, Memento, Fight Club and Source Code became critical and commercial successes, often acquiring a cult status with audiences. With their multiple story lines, unreliable narrators, ambiguous twist endings, and paradoxical worlds, these films challenge traditional ways of narrative comprehension and in many cases require and reward multiple viewings. But how can me make sense of films that don't always make sense the way we are used to? While most scholarship has treated these complex films as narrative puzzles that audiences solve with their cognitive skills, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films offers a fresh perspective by suggesting that they appeal to the body and the senses in equal measures. Mind-game films tell stories about crises between body, mind and world, and about embodied forms of knowing and subjective ways of being-in-the-world. Through compelling in-depth case studies of popular mind-game films, the book explores how these complex narratives take their (embodied) spectators with them into such crises. The puzzling effect generated by these films stems from a conflict between what we think and what we experience, between what we know and what we feel to be true, and between what we see and what we sense.

Die Beitrage dieses Sammelbandes widmen sich dem Zusammenspiel unterschiedlichster Stimmen in Literatur und Film aus Lateinamerika, Lusoafrika und Portugal sowie deren intermedialen, intertextuellen und transkulturellen Verflechtungen. Sie bewegen sich innerhalb kolonialer und postkolonialer Fragestellungen und Diskurse, die bis heute in der kulturellen Produktion der lusophonen Welt nachhallen. Die Sprache wird zur Arena, in der aus unterschiedlichsten Perspektiven eine Vielzahl von Narrativen uber die (Neu-)Inszenierung von Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tod und Tabus im lusophonen Raum verhandelt wird. Os artigos reunidos nesta coletanea dedicam-se ao enlace de varias vozes nos textos literarios e filmicos da America Latina, Africa Lusofona e Portugal e suas relacoes intermediais, intertextuais e transculturais. Situam-se entre questoes e discursos coloniais e pos-coloniais, que ate hoje reverberam na producao cultural do mundo lusofono. A linguagem torna-se uma arena, na qual e debatida de diferentes perspectivas uma grande variedade de narrativas sobre a (re-)encenacao de historia, memoria, morte e tabus nas culturas lusofonas.

This book offers a unique approach to storytelling, connecting the Enneagram system with classic story principles of character development, plot, and story structure to provide a seven-step methodology to achieve rapid story development. Using the nine core personality styles underlying all human thought, feeling, and action, it provides the tools needed to understand and leverage the Enneagram-Story Connection for writing success. Author Jeff Lyons starts with the basics of the Enneagram system and builds with how to discover and design the critical story structure components of any story, featuring supporting examples of the Enneagram-Story Connection in practice across film, literature and TV. Readers will learn the fundamentals of the Enneagram system and how to utilize it to create multidimensional characters, master premise line development, maintain narrative drive, and create antagonists that are perfectly designed to challenge your protagonist in a way that goes beyond surface action to reveal the dramatic core of any story. Lyons explores the use of the Enneagram as a tool not only for character development, but for story development itself. This is the ideal text for intermediate and advanced level screenwriting and creative writing students, as well as professional screenwriters and novelists looking to get more from their writing process and story structure.

A professional TV writer's real-world guide to getting paid to write great television
"No need for me to ever write a book on TV writing. Alex Epstein has covered it all . . . along with a few things I wouldn't have thought of. Save yourself five years of rookie mistakes. "Crafty TV Writing" and talent are pretty much all you'll need to make it."
--Ken Levine, writer/producer, "MASH," "Cheers," "Frasier," "The Simpsons," "Wings," "Becker"
Everyone watches television, and everyone has an opinion on what makes good TV. But, as Alex Epstein shows in this invaluable guide, writing for television is a highly specific craft that requires knowledge, skill, and more than a few insider's tricks.
Epstein, a veteran TV writer and show creator himself, provides essential knowledge about the entire process of television writing, both for beginners and for professionals who want to go to the next level. "Crafty TV Writing" explains how to decode the hidden structure of a TV series. It describes the best ways to generate a hook, write an episode, create characters the audience will never tire of, construct entertaining dialogue, and use humor. It shows how to navigate the tough but rewarding television industry, from writing your first "spec" script, to getting hired to work on a show, to surviving--even thriving--if you get fired. And it illuminates how television writers think about the shows they're writing, whether they're working in comedy, drama, or "reality."
Fresh, funny, and informed, "Crafty TV Writing" is the essential guide to writing for and flourishing in the world of television.

In this inspiring guide, writing teacher and anthropologist Jepson draws on her worldwide travels and studies of spiritual traditions to present a refreshing approach to the art of writing. Through rituals, exercises, dream analysis, and more, writers will find fresh techniques for honing their skills, overcoming creative blocks, and finding their authentic voices, while writing bravely, honestly, and with true vision.