A Spectator Best Book of the Year `There are three rules for writing a novel,' Somerset Maugham once said. `Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.' So how to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, avoid plagiarism (or choose not to), or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets-writing a good sex scene? Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on a fascinating excursion into the lives and minds of our greatest writers-from Balzac and Eliot to Woolf and Nabokov, through to Zadie Smith and Stephen King, with a few mischievous detours to Tolstoy along the way. In a glittering tour d'horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws.

8000 miles from home

1085 calories a day

3 months to write the novel that would make her name

At least that was the plan. But when Nell Stevens travelled to Bleaker Island in the Falklands (official population: two) she didn’t count on the isolation getting to her . . .

Hilarious and heartbreaking, this is a book about loneliness and creativity. It is about discovering who you are when there’s no one else around. And it’s about what to do when a plan doesn’t work: ultimately Nell may have failed to write a novel, but she succeeded in becoming a writer.

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?"

W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

In the Spring of 1975 the film director Richard Pearce approached Cormac McCarthy with the idea of writing a screenplay. Though already a widely acclaimed novelist, the author of such modern classics as The Orchard Keeper and Child of God, McCarthy had never before written a screenplay. Using nothing more than a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist as inspiration, the author and Pearce together roamed the mill towns of the South researching their subject. One year later McCarthy finished The Gardener's Son, a taut, riveting drama of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence spanning two generations of mill owners and workers, fathers and sons, during the rise and fall of one of America's most bizarre utopian industrial experiments. Produced as a two-hour film and broadcast on PBS in 1976, The Gardener's Son recieved two Emmy Award nominations and was shown at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals. This is the first appearance of the film script in book form.

Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, The Gardener's Son is the tale of two families: the Greggs, a wealthy family that owns and operates the local cotton mill, and the McEvoys, a family of mill workers beset by misfortune. The action opens as Robert McEvoy, a young mill worker, is having his leg amputated -- the limb mangled in an accident rumored to have been caused by James Gregg, son of the mill's founder. McEvoy, crippled and isolated, grows into a man with a "troubled heart"; consumed by bitterness and anger, he deserts both his job and his family.

Returning two years later at the news of his mother's terminal illness, Robert McEvoy arrives only to confront the grave diggers preparing her final resting place. His father, the mill's gardener, is now working on the factory line, the gardens forgotten. These proceedings stoke the slow burning rage McEvoy carries within him, a fury that ultimately consumes both the McEvoys and the Greggs.

In this innovative fusion of practice and criticism, Jeremy Scott shows how insights from stylistics and linguistics can enrich the craft of creative writing. Focusing on crucial methodological issues that confront the practicing writer, this book introduces writers to key topics from stylistics, provides in-depth analysis of a wide range of writing examples and includes practical exercises to help develop creative writing skills. Thoroughly revised and expanded throughout, this updated edition more clearly lays out specialist ideas and technical terms within the field of linguistics, and features both greater focus on the creative process and more practical exercises to help writers engage with ideas in their work. Clear and accessible, this invaluable guide will give both students and writers a greater critical awareness of the creative possibilities of language.

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing explores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term "craft consciousness" identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word. For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.

Crammed with crucial facts, ideas, and warnings never before brought together into clear focus, this guide is not only fun to read, but also work-boots practical. Not only inspiring, but pinch-penny accurate. Not only optimistic, but report-card candid. Not only kindly, but tattle-tale frank. It is an energizing tonic for writers' weary brain cells. Every writer is important. Creative Writing for People Who Can't Not Write is a book for every writer. Topics in this lively blend of advice, inspiration, and scholarly wit include: - the wonder of creativity - getting published, paid, and read - why writing should be impossible - how to avoid looking foolish in print - a sugar-coated history of the whimsical, word-rich English language - the nature of poetry - the sixteen writer-type temperaments - reflections from contemporary writers on their work - a first-ever collation of pages of advice from C.S. Lewis. Lewis once wrote to Lindskoog, "If you understand me so well, you will understand other authors, too." Writers who read Creative Writing for People Who Can't Not Write will agree with Lewis' assessment of Kathryn Lindskoog's insight into the writing life. And this book also passes Lindskoog's own test: "A good writer is a graceful guest in a reader's brain."

This pioneering work equips you with the skills needed to create and design powerful stories and concepts for interactive, digital, multi-platform storytelling and experience design that will take audience engagement to the next level. Klaus Sommer Paulsen presents a bold new vision of what storytelling can become if it is reinvented as an audience-centric design method. His practices unlock new ways of combining story with experience for a variety of existing, new and upcoming platforms. Merging theory and practice, storytelling and design principles, this innovative toolkit instructs the next generation of creators on how to successfully balance narratives, design and digital innovation to develop strategies and concepts that both apply and transcend current technology. Packed with theory and exercises intended to unlock new narrative dimensions, Integrated Storytelling by Design is a must-read for creative professionals looking to shape the future of themed, branded and immersive experiences.

A writer will change and grow many times in their writing life. This Journal Workbook aims to champion this journey. It answers those tricky questions writers long to ask, shares secret practices to inspire their writing confidence, and free their unique gifts from common obstacles and writing worries. In this Journal Workbook you will discover surprising new techniques from acting, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality to re-wild your creativity and empower your writing craft. Writing can seem overwhelming. You long to be a writer, but where do you start? And how do you bridge the gap between where you are right now and where you want to go? How do you discover your voice? What does that even mean? And what can you do to improve your writing? Or discover what you want to write about? This is not a book about getting published or finding an agent. This is a book about finding you. Finding your voice. Trusting your talent. Your creativity. It is about putting your heart and soul into your writing practice. Do the prompts and exercises. Reflect. This Journal Workbook will help you find that spark. This is your writing life, write it your way.