An eloquently delivered treatise on the craft of fiction writing - part writing guide, part study of the mechanics of the genre.

Chronicles the process of becoming a writer, guiding young storytellers through the joys and challenges of the writing process.

Hundreds of books have been written on the art of writing. Here at last is a book by two professional editors to teach writers the techniques of the editing trade that turn promising manuscripts into published novels and short stories.

In this completely revised and updated second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on

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Albert Zuckerman, legendary literary agent, has worked with many bestselling authors, including Ken Follett, Olivia Goldsmith, Antoinette Van Heugten, Michael Lewis, and F. Paul Wilson. Zuckerman is a master at teaching writers the skills necessary to crack the bestseller list. For this revised edition of Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Zuckerman has added an analysis of Nora Roberts's The Witness, which he uses along with classic books like Gone...

Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the...

Critical writing could scarcely be more admirable than this, pronounced the New York Times in its review of this 1921 classic of literary criticism. This immensely influential text examines such authors as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Thackeray, and James, with an eye toward the form rather than the content of storytelling.

Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University - his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler...

"Damn good" fiction is dramatic fiction, Frey insists, whether it is by Hemingway or Grisham, Le Carre or Ludlum, Austen or Dickens. Despite their differences, these authors' works share common elements: strong narrative lines, fascinating characters, steadily building conflicts, and satisfying conclusions. Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel is one of the most widely used guides ever published for aspiring authors. Here, in How to Write a Damn...

Ideas, facts, and possibilities for characters and development, storytelling and plotting, language, locations, research, and specific genres/themes including horror and the occult, the love story, marriage and the family, comedy, sports, medicine, crime, espionage, the military, vehicles, the old West, and religion.

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms-such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"-have become...