This book offers practical advice on every aspect of writing novels and short stories: plotting and narrative development, characterization and dialogue, sources of material, planning an opening, roughing out chapters, using suspense and emotional color, rewriting and highlighting and much more. Examples drawn from the works of outstanding writers, past and present, illustrate each point, making this the perfect handbook for professional writers and students.

Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge, and College Writing invites students to learn about and participate in a series of related conversations about student identities, the aims of the university, and the conventions of academic writing. Rather than seeing academic writing as consisting of objective statements of "truth," the editors of this textbook view it as a social construction of knowledge that requires rhetorical choices as well as empirical research. This book represents academic writing as a sequence of continuing conversations within discourse communities provides a variety of oppotunities to engage with and participate in these converstaions.