The second book in the Write Great Fiction series, Plot and Structure offers clear and concise information on creating a believable and engaging plot that readers can't resist. Written by award-winning thriller and suspense author James Scott Bell, this handy instruction guide provides: Easy-to-understand techniques on every aspect of plotting and structure, from brainstorming story ideas to building scenes, and from using subplots to crafting knock-out endings; Engaging exercises, perfect for writers at any level and at any stage in their novel; Practical and encouraging guidance from one of the most respected writers publishing today; Full of diagrams, plot brainstormers, and examples from popular novels, mastering plot and structure has never been so simple.

Are you beginning a creative writing course? Or thinking about taking one?

Doing Creative Writing is the ideal guide to what you should expect, what will be expected of you and how you can get the most from your course.

It clearly and concisely outlines:

• the contexts for creative writing courses, explaining where the subject has come from and why that matters
• the content, structure and delivery of the courses, helping you to understand how your course will be shaped, what you will be asked to do and why
• the skills you will develop, from self-discipline and time management through to the organisation of ideas, 'reading as a writer' and editing
• possibilities beyond the course, showing how you continue to benefit from what you've learned.

Drawing on years of teaching and writing experience, as well as interviews with a wide range of students, Steve May provides all the background, advice and encouragement you need to embark on a creative writing course with complete confidence and to get maximum benefit from every writing session.

Global Scriptwriting offers a look at an exciting new phase in screen storytelling, as writers and directors from all over the world infuse traditional forms with their own cultural values to create stories that have an international appeal and suggest a universality among readers, viewers, and listeners. A unique blend of screenwriting technique and film studies, Global Scriptwriting discusses screen stories as they have evolved through the years, focusing first on the basics of scriptwriting, then going on to afford a more sophisticated look at script via different models of scriptwriting: the Hollywood model, the independent model, the national model, and various alternative models. It examines the internationalization of storytelling, and illustrates how particular innovations have helped national screen stories to international success.

This book is the first to incorporate the basics of the classical form with the innovative edge of the last decade, as well the culture specific changes that have taken place outside of North America. It offers readers a view of the enriched repertoire available to writers resulting from the introduction of cultural perspectives into traditional story forms. Specific topics examined include, the ascent of voice, the search for new forms, the struggle between style and content, and the centrality of megagenre.
Includes numerous case studies and examples
Focuses on how adaptation, innovation, and cultural values combine to create internationally successful stories

The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook is a collection of professional essays on the teaching of writing. It is assigned in graduate courses on the teaching of composition. The authors Tate, Corbett, and Myers are widely respected for their work in rhetoric and composition. The authors have added eleven new essays to the fourth edition and have deleted some essays from the previous edition.

Many narratives of theater history suggest that the 1960s marked the start of a turning away from traditional, script-based, playwright-centric production practices. Literary studies in this period began exploring the concept of the "death of the author" along similar lines. But the author refused to die quietly, and authorship reasserts itself in even revolutionary and avant-garde theaters throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The model of authorship-valorizing individuality, ownership, and originality-serves to maintain traditional modes of production that reproduce and uphold dominant ideologies even when the products created by those modes of production claim to buck tradition or run counter to cultural currents. This ideology of authorship plays a part in playwrights shutting down productions of their own plays, in the privileging of individual authorship over joint authorship even in collaborative genres, and in the insistence on originality even in performance traditions rooted in a shared repertoire. This tension between the theoretical death of the author and the growth of actual authors' abilities to control access to and even in some cases interpretations of their work exposes the deftness with which dominant ideologies and their attendant modes of production can repurpose the aesthetics of even countercultural or revolutionary movements in theater.

THE ENDURING MYTH THAT MAKES US HUMAN What makes a hero? Who better to answer that question than Lee Child... 'It's Lee Child. Why would you not read it?' Karin Slaughter 'I don't know another author so skilled at making me turn the page' The Times In his first work of nonfiction, the creator of the multimillion-selling Jack Reacher series explores the endurance of heroes from Achilles to Bond, showing us how this age-old myth is a fundamental part of what makes us human. He demonstrates how hero stories continue to shape our world - arguing that we need them now more than ever. From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling? Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential reading for anyone trying to write or understand fiction. Child teaches us how these stories still shape our minds and behaviour in an increasingly confusing modern world, and with his trademark concision and wit, demonstrates that however civilised we get, we'll always need heroes.

A complete guide to the art and craft of creative nonfiction--from one of its pioneer practitioners
The challenge of creative nonfiction is to write the truth in a style that is as accurate and informative as reportage, yet as personal, provocative, and dramatic as fiction. In this one-of-a-kind guide, award-winning author, essayist, teacher, and editor Lee Gutkind gives you concise, pointed advice on every aspect of writing and selling your work, including:
* Guidelines for choosing provocative--and salable--topics
* Smart research techniques--including advice on conducting penetrating interviews and using electronic research tools
* Tips for focusing and structuring a piece for maximum effectiveness
* Advice on working successfully with editors and literary agents

'After a number of years teaching writing courses and appearing at writers' conferences, I began to see that creating a process book utilising one of my novels as an example of each step of my process might prove useful to people who are interested in novel writing or in how this individual writer approaches the complicated task of putting together a British crime novel.' As the author of twenty-four novels, Elizabeth George is one of the most successful - and prolific - novelists today. In Mastering the Process, George offers a master class in the art and science of crafting a novel, sharing her wealth of experience with would-be novelists, and with crime fiction fans. Using her actual work to illustrate the various steps of novel writing that she explores in this book, she illustrates her points about plotting, characterisation and technique with great clarity and generosity. Drawing from her personal photos, early notes, character analyses, and rough drafts for every stage of her novel Careless in Red, George offers us an intimate look at the procedures she follows, from researching location to imagining plot to creating characters to the actual writing and revision processes themselves. At the same time, she gives invaluable advice for writers about what has worked for her - and what hasn't. Mastering the Process provides writers with practical, prescriptive, and achievable tools for creating a novel, editing a novel, and problem solving when in the midst of a novel, from a master storyteller at the top of her game. Elizabeth George has taught creative writing both nationally and internationally for over thirty years and is the author of Write Away, described as 'one novelist's approach to fiction and the writing life'.

Following the death of her mother, nineteen-year-old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to Italy to stay with old family friends and to have her portrait done. She is eager to renew her acquaintance with Niccolo Donati, the handsome young boy from a neighboring family with whom she shared her first kiss on a visit four years earlier, and anxious to solve a riddle left in her mother's diary--the answer to which may change Lucy's life forever.

This book has been designed specifically for students in writing classes and other writers interested in developing proficient writing careers in a professional environment. As professional writing continues to change rapidly alongside digital developments, this book frames professional writing particularly for 'creative' and other writers. The professional world needs writers with a diverse portfolio of skills and capabilities; if writers can master these, they are more able to make a living from their writing and support their more creative endeavours. Each chapter includes a comprehensive range of exercises to build professional skills, along with learning objectives, case studies, worked examples, tips for success, and suggested websites and further reading.

"I would urge other writers, at whatever point in their careers, to take the time to read this indispensable handbook....Telling Lies for Fun & Profit should be a permanent part of every writer's library."

-- From the Introduction by Sue Grafton

Characters refusing to talk? Plot plodding along? Where do good ideas come from anyway? In this wonderfully practical volume, two-time Edgar Award-winning novelist Lawrence Block takes an inside look at writing as a craft and as a career.

From studying the market, to mastering self-discipline and "creative procrastination," through coping with rejections, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit is an invaluable sourcebook of information. It is a must read for anyone serious about writing or understanding how the process works.

Peter Elbow's widely acclaimed and original theories on the writing process, set forth in Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power, have earned him a reputation as a leading educational innovator. Now Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education. At once theoretical and down-to-earth, this collection will appeal not only to teachers, adminitrators and students, but to anyone with a love of learning.

Elbow explores the "contraries" in the educational process, in particular his theory that clear thinking can be enhanced by inviting indecision, incoherence, and paradoxical thinking. The essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, are engaged in a single enterprise: to arrive at insights or conclusions about learning and teaching while still doing justice to the "rich messiness" of intellectual inquiry. Drawing his conclusions from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher, Elbow discusses the value of interdisciplinary teaching, his theory of "cooking" (an interaction of conflicting ideas), the authority relationship in teaching and the value of specifying learning objectives. A full section is devoted to evaluation and feedback, both of students and faculty. Finally, Elbow focuses on the need to move beyond the skepticism of critical thinking to what he calls "methodological belief"--an ability to embrace more than one point of view.

"Securing a Place for Reading in Composition" addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.

Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a "mindful reading" framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.
"Securing a Place for Reading in Composition" also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.

This expanded edition adds sixteen new exercises designed to inspire creativity and help poets hone their skills. Each exercise includes a clearly-stated learning objective, historical background matter on the particular subgenre being explored, and an example written by undergraduates at Western Kentucky University. The text also analyzes work by leading American poets including Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel and Dean Young. The book's five chapters correspond with the five canons of classical rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

Introduces different kinds of poems, including headline, letter, recipe, list, and monologue, and provides exercises in writing poems based on both memory and imagination.

From budding bloggers to bestselling novelists, your fellow writers share their best advice, writing tips, time management strategies, and personal ups and downs in the business of writing. These stories will motivate you, entertain you, and keep those words flowing! Bestselling novelist J.A. Jance explains how her next book rights a wrong done to a friend killed in Vietnam. Award-winning Young Adult novelist Sarah Darer Littman talks about her "second book blues." Read how bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan was mentored in the writing world by someone she had first mentored in the TV world, and how Jenna Glatzer overcame her agoraphobia to ghostwrite Celine Dion's biography. Marc Tyler Nobleman explains how he unmasked the true creator of the Batman series. With chapters on overcoming your fears, beating writer's block, accepting rejection, and making time to write, you'll feel like you're at a first-class writers' conference. Additional chapters cover how to use writers' groups and mentors effectively, tried and true methods to find new inspiration, and how writing can change your own life and others.

'We should write because it is human nature to write' Julia Cameron For those jumping into the writing life for the first time and for those already living it, the art of writing will never be the same after reading this book. Provocative, thoughtful and exciting, The Right to Write will draw you back again and again as you seek to liberate and cultivate the writer residing within you. This isn't a book of rules, which can stifle creativity - it's a book about using writing to bring clarity and passion to the act of living. The secret is in breaking loose from the grip of your established thought process to unleash the wave of creativity which is striving to express itself. With the techniques and illustrative stories in The Right to Write, you'll learn how to make writing a natural and intensely personal part of your life. You'll also discover the details of Cameron's own writing processes, the ones she uses to create her poetry, plays, essays, novels and bestselling books, including the world famous The Artist's Way.

'I've always wanted to be an author'; 'People often ask me when I'm going to write my book'; 'I have a story to tell, but I never seem to make time to write' These are just a few of the messages Kelly Notaras hears every day from potential authors around the globe. Life coaches with new methods for living with purpose, healers who've learned how to prevent disease and increase life force, and everyday heroes and heroines who've made it through difficult circumstances and want to inspire others to do the same. This book will light the way, offering a simple, step-by-step path for turning your transformational idea or story into a finished book as quickly as possible. You'll discover how to: - Be clear on your motivation for writing a book - Craft a powerful, compelling hook and a strong internal structure - Handle resistance, writer's block and other obstacles that can keep you from sitting down to write - Take your finished manuscript to the next level, whether through traditional publishing or self-publishing - so that you can share your message with the world! With humour, encouragement and common sense, book industry veteran Kelly Notaras demystifies the publishing process so you can get started, keep writing and successfully get your wisdom onto the page.