|
|
Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Creative writing & creative writing guides
From the master of STORY, DIALOGUE, and CHARACTER, ACTION offers
writers the keys to powerful storytelling. ACTION explores the ways
that a modern-day writer can successfully tell an action story that
stands apart from all others. In collaboration with former co-host
of The Story Toolkit, Bassim El-Wakil, legendary story lecturer
Robert McKee guides writers to award-winning originality by
analysing the action genre, highlighting the challenges and, more
importantly, showing how to master the demands of plot creation
through innovation and ingenuity. ACTION is a must-have addition to
the McKee storytelling oeuvre.
This book examines the practices of writers in the AAA video game
industry, to provide a model for game writing pedagogy that
highlights the roles and skills utilized by these innovative
storytellers. Based on a two-year qualitative study, gathering data
through conversational interviews, Seth Hudson combines theory,
practice, and his experience as an educator-researcher to shed
light on the phenomenon of game writing and writers who drive
innovation in game storytelling. The author gives context for a
range of audiences, examining the role of computer game design
(CGD) in higher education, the role of writing and narrative design
within those programs, the current and historical challenges game
writers face, and the purpose of the research underpinning this
book. Hudson frames a synthesis of research findings and relevant
theory to illustrate new teaching practices informed by his
findings that will help better serve students. This book will
provide an essential resource for game studies and game design
educators and researchers, as well as game narrative enthusiasts.
If you are a writer of fiction, this practical handbook will teach
you how to acquire your own writer's tool-box. Here you will learn
all about developing your craft. The wide-ranging exploration of
fiction-writing skills contains many unique features, such as the
focus on reflective learning and tuition on advanced skills
including foreshadowing, transitions and producing short story
cycles. Throughout, the approach is centred on three kinds of
activity: - examining the theory of particular fiction writing
skills - analysing the practice of these skills in examples of
published work - practising the use of skills in fiction-writing
exercises. What makes this guide so distinctive, though, is the way
it consistently asks you to reflect on your work, and stresses the
importance of being able to articulate the processes of writing.
Packed with wisdom about the art of fiction and filled with writing
exercises, How To Write Fiction (And Think About It) examines the
work of today's finest authors to teach you everything you need to
know about writing short stories or longer fiction. Whether you are
a student, a would-be professional author, or a general reader who
simply likes to write for pleasure, this guide will equip you with
a portfolio of key fiction-writing skills.
Screenplay: Building Story Through Character is designed to help
screenwriters turn simple or intricate ideas into exciting,
multidimensional film narratives with fully-realized characters.
Based on Jule Selbo's unique 11-step structure for building story
through characters, the book teaches budding screenwriters the
skills to focus and shape their ideas, turning them into stories
filled with character development, strong plot elements based on
obstacles and conflicts, and multifaceted emotional arcs. Using
examples and analysis from classic and contemporary films across a
range of genres, from The Godfather to Guardians of the Galaxy,
Selbo's Screenplay takes students inside the scriptwriting process,
providing a broad overview for both beginners and seasoned writers
alike. The book is rounded out with discussion questions, writing
exercises, a guide to the business of screenwriting, in-depth film
breakdowns, and a glossary of screenwriting terms.
* Fascinating cross-disciplinary work encompassing, AI, cognitive
science, learning science, creative writing and thinking skills *
Explores the role of the next wave of AI in creativity, education,
literature and literacy * Written by experts in computing,
education and creative writing * Explores the cutting edge and the
limits of simulations of human creativity
Perfect for playwrights and screenwriters of all levels of
experience, The Writer's Toolkit will equip you with everything
required to kickstart your creativity, develop your craft, and make
your writing the very best that it can be. Written by an
experienced playwright, screenwriter and producer, this essential
book is packed with almost two hundred practical exercises,
techniques and ideas for every part of your process, designed to be
used either solo or in a group. It includes: Writing warm-ups to
focus your mind and get your creative muscles in gear Dozens of
exercises to strengthen fundamental elements of your writing such
as developing characters, improving dialogue, layering in subtext,
creating a strong setting and constructing a compelling plot
Immersive-writing techniques to lift the world of your script off
the page and allow you to shape it more effectively A blueprint for
writing a ten-minute play - a great way to practise your craft,
explore a new idea and add to your portfolio A Submission Surgery
with exercises and pointers so you can review and fine-tune your
completed work before sending it out 101 quick-fire writing prompts
to help you warm up, take a break from your current project, or
just keep you feeling productive Also included are mindful
meditations to use at the beginning and end of your writing
sessions, to help you relax, boost your productivity and maximise
your creative output. Whatever you need as a writer - whether
that's to crack a problem in your current script, develop ideas for
future projects, build up your skills and experience, or bust
through writer's block - this book will give you the right tools
for the job. So get writing! 'A generous and inventive book, packed
full of the creativity it is bound to inspire' Anna Jordan,
playwright and screenwriter (Succession, Killing Eve, Yen) 'An
enthusiastic, encouraging guide with endless tips to make every
stage of the writing process not only doable but enjoyable too'
Diane Samuels, playwright and author (Kindertransport)
Television drama has come to rival cinema in its sophisticated
narrative form and high production values. At the heart of this
success is the television writer, and TV has become the home of
some of the most exciting and high quality writing. In a series of
original interviews, showrunners and writers from some of the
biggest American TV dramas of recent years share their experiences
and practices of the 'writers' room', on shows such as The
Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Game of Thrones. Christina Kallas
frames these insider insights with an astute overview of the
writer's instrumental role in the rise of sophisticated TV
narrative, and concluding reflections which will be invaluable to
writers, critics and fans alike.
A clear, supportive and comprehensive guide to writing a play -
based on the author's long-running playwriting masterclasses, as
taught at the UK's National Theatre. This book leads you through
everything you need to know, including: The theatrical tools and
techniques you can use to bring your play to life on the stage (and
how these differ from writing for film and TV); Discovering and
trusting your writing process, with a range of approaches for
developing your initial idea into a completed script; Understanding
your characters, including their goals and central conflicts, and
using emotional logic to connect them to your story; Finding the
dramatic structure and theatrical setting that best suits your
play; The key elements of constructing a great scene, including how
to handle exposition, invoke tension, deepen characterisation and
create effective transitions; Writing engaging, active dialogue by
finding each character's voice, balancing exposition with subtext,
and rooting what a character says in their specific context
Throughout, you'll find examples from classical and modern plays,
plus insights from other contemporary playwrights into their own
writing journeys. Each chapter provides a set of exercises to help
you practise what you've learnt. There's also advice on what to do
once you've finished your script - including redrafting, receiving
feedback and taking notes - and how to navigate your play's
progress towards production. Whether you're an emerging playwright
or embarking on your first-ever play, The Playwright's Journey will
help you develop your creativity, strengthen your connection to
your material, and transform your idea into a fully formed play
that feels alive on the page - and the stage.
Implementing a novel method for identifying idiolectal
co-selections, and taking the UNABOM investigation as a case study,
this Pivot evaluates the effectiveness and reliability of using the
web for forensic purposes.
Writing autobiography is a complicated, often fraught activity for
both writer and reader. We can find many recent examples of the way
such writing calls into question the author's truthfulness or their
authority to present as definitive their 'version' of a particular
event or portion of their lives. Drawing upon a wide range of late
twentieth and early twenty-first-century autobiographical writing,
"The Fiction of Autobiography" examines key aspects of
autobiography from the interrelated perspectives of author, reader,
critic and scholar, to reconsider how we view this form of writing,
and its relationship to the way we understand and construct
identity. Maftei considers recent cases and texts such as Didion's
"The Year of Magical Thinking" and Frey's "A Million Little Pieces
"alongside older texts such as Proust's "In Search of Lost Time,"
Nabokov's "Speak, Memory "and Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas." In part, this is to emphasise that key issues reappear
and arise over decades and centuries, and that texts distanced by
time can speak to each other thoughtfully and poignantly.
In Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade: Practice,
Praxis, Print, Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore, along with
prominent scholar-practitioners, undertake a critical examination
of the intersection of creative writing scholarship and the
publishing industry. Recent years have seen dramatic shifts within
the publishing industry as well as rapid evolution and development
in academic creative writing programs. This book addresses all of
these core areas and transformations, such as the pros and cons of
self-publishing versus traditional publishing, issues of diversity
and representation within the publishing industry, digital
transformations, and possible career pathways for writing students.
It is crucial for creative writing pedagogy to deal with the issues
raised by the sudden changes within the industry and this book will
be of interest to creative writing students and practitioners as
well as publishing students and professionals.
As entertaining as it is enlightening, Creating Dialogue for TV:
Screenwriters Talk Television presents interviews with five
Hollywood professionals who talk about all things related to
dialogue - from naturalistic style to the building of characters to
swearing and dialect. Screenwriters/showrunners David Mandel (Curb
Your Enthusiasm, Veep), Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica,
Once Upon a Time), Robert Berens (Supernatural), Sheila Lawrence
(Gilmore Girls, Ugly Betty, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel), and Doris
Egan (Tru Calling, House, Reign) field a linguist's inquiries about
the craft of writing dialogue. This book is for anyone who has ever
wondered what creative processes and attitudes lie behind the words
they encounter when tuning into their favourite television show. It
provides direct insights into Hollywood writers' knowledge and
opinions of how language is used in television narratives, and in
doing so shows how language awareness, attitudes and the craft of
using words are utilised to create popular TV series. The book will
appeal to students and teachers in screenwriting, creative writing
and linguistics as well as lay readers.
Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and
digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for
enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry,
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. A Guide to Creative Writing and the
Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning
through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and
reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume's
key features include: * Strengthening key underlying capabilities
of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness,
clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail,
sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. *
Taking direction from other art forms such as African American
musical improvisation, Brancusi's sculptural idea of "finding
form," key ideas from drawing such as foreground, background, and
negative space-and some of the great lessons learned from National
Geographic photography. * Incorporating techniques drawn from
unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL,
working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote
indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for
a global English market as a core or supplementary text at the
undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level.
* An original, accessible book on the unique challenges and
benefits of teaching creative writing to nonnative English writers
* Equal emphasis on teaching in ESL and EFL environments, to appeal
to English immersion and EMI contexts in Asia and Europe * This
book provides practical advice and assignments to help preservice
teachers and instructors develop their classes, and offers guidance
on evaluation and provides exercises tailored to the needs of L2
writers * This book breaks from tradition ideas of creative writing
in the sense of genre and instead focuses on concrete writing
skills
The Sentences That Create Us draws from the unique insights of over
fifty justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer
inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison.
Centering in the philosophy that writers in prison can be as
vibrant and capable as writers on the outside, and have much to
offer readers everywhere, The Sentences That Create Us aims to
propel writers in prison to launch their work into the world beyond
the walls, while also embracing and supporting the creative
community within the walls. The Sentences That Create Us is a
comprehensive resource writers can grow with, beginning with the
foundations of creative writing. A roster of impressive
contributors including Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems),
Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math), Wilbert Rideau (In the Place
of Justice) and Piper Kerman (Orange is the New Black), among many
others, address working within and around the severe institutional,
emotional, psychological and physical limitations of writing prison
through compelling first-person narratives. The book's authors
offer pragmatic advice on editing techniques, pathways to
publication, writing routines, launching incarcerated-run prison
publications and writing groups, lesson plans from prison educators
and next-step resources. Threaded throughout the book is the
running theme of addressing lived trauma in writing, and writing's
capacity to support an authentic healing journey centered in
accountability and restoration. While written towards people in the
justice system, this book can serve anyone seeking hard won lessons
and inspiration for their own creative-and human-journey.
 |
The Reward
(Hardcover)
Robert Burns
|
R554
R509
Discovery Miles 5 090
Save R45 (8%)
|
Ships in 18 - 22 working days
|
|
|
This book examines the dynamic landscape of creative educations in
Asia, exploring the intersection of post-coloniality, translation,
and creative educations in one of the world's most relevant testing
grounds for STEM versus STEAM educational debates. Several essays
attend to one of today's most pressing issues in Creative Writing
education, and education generally: the convergence of the former
educational revolution of Creative Writing in the anglophone world
with a defining aspect of the 21st-century-the shift from
monolingual to multilingual writers and learners. The essays look
at examples from across Asia with specific experience from India,
Singapore, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan. Each of
the 14 writer-professor contributors has taught Creative Writing
substantially in Asia, often creating and directing the first
university Creative Writing programs there. This book will be of
interest to anyone following global trends within creative writing
and those with an interest in education and multilingualism in
Asia.
* A practical guide for students in writing classes of all kinds:
creative writing, professional writing and academic writing; *
Covers writing for online publication including social media as
well as the most common documents in university and writing-reliant
workplaces; * Provides extensive practical examples, exercises,
activities and quizzes, as well as online resources including video
interviews with the top grammarians in the world
* A practical guide for students in writing classes of all kinds:
creative writing, professional writing and academic writing; *
Covers writing for online publication including social media as
well as the most common documents in university and writing-reliant
workplaces; * Provides extensive practical examples, exercises,
activities and quizzes, as well as online resources including video
interviews with the top grammarians in the world
Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA,
the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with A Stranger's Journey, David
Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our
increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more
inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in
relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of
narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer
technique-focused readings of writers such as Junot Diaz, ZZ
Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Sherman Alexie, while
making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a
Japanese American writer. In A Stranger's Journey, Mura poses two
central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an
exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura
examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary
canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy.
Here, like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff Chang's Who
We Be, A Stranger's Journey breaks new ground in our understanding
of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and
culture. The book's second central question involves structure: How
does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative
tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction,
screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura
candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir
and how questions of identity occupy a central place in
contemporary memoir.
The New Writer's Guide to Producing Great Content Everyone has that
fabled "book in them" but not everyone has the talent to write it.
Right? Wrong. Great writing's not a talent. It's a craft. It can be
taught and learnt, affording everyone the confidence to express
themselves in words. Writing Well for Work & Pleasure teaches
you how to start your writing project and how to keep going. It
deconstructs the elements of writing - creating a step-by-step
process for generating content that's ready for publication. With
tips on style, eloquence and finding your voice, it also teaches
you how to write for different audiences, including professionals,
the public, students, customers and even your opponents. And it
helps writers talk to editors, publishers and other industry
insiders. This book is for professionals and academics wanting to
write that book; ambitious executives needing to write a white
paper to accelerate their careers; managers being asked to write
articles for publication; artisans and hobbyists with skills to
convey; idealists and polemicists wanting to inspire and agitate;
and anyone wanting to write well in order to improve their
communications skills. "If you follow Robert Kelsey's advice you
will produce better prose, which will be both easier for readers to
understand and more persuasive, whichever audience you are
addressing. I strongly recommend it," Luke Johnson, columnist,
author, serial entrepreneur and Chairman of Risk Capital Partners
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.
|
You may like...
Hopscotch 3
Jennifer Heath
Paperback
R669
Discovery Miles 6 690
|