What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 iul 2009

Organized by the elements of fiction and comprised primarily of writing exercises, this text helps students hone and refine their craft with a practical, hands-on approach to writing fiction.

This text features several exercises on each particular aspect of fiction-characterization, point of view, plot, dialogue, etc. Every exercise is introduced by an opening paragraph that provides insight into and information on that element of fiction. The introduction is followed by instructions for completing the exercise, the "objective" of the exercise, and frequently by a student example. The text is rounded out by an anthology of contemporary and highly teachable short fiction.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780205616886
ISBN-10: 0205616887
Pagini: 445
Dimensiuni: 177 x 233 x 21 mm
Greutate: 0.61 kg
Ediția:College
Editura: Longman Publishing Group
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Descriere

Organized by the elements of fiction and comprised primarily of writing exercises, this text helps students hone and refine their craft with a practical, hands-on approach to writing fiction.

Cuprins

<>Contents Preface

Introduction

PART ONE
Beginnings
            1.         First Sentences: Beginning in the Middle
            2.         Second Sentences as Different Paths
            3.         Ways to Begin a Story, from Robie Macauley
            4.         Begin a Story with a “Given” First Line, from William Kittredge
            5.         Free Associating from Random Sentences, from DeWitt Henry
            6.         Person, Place, and Song, from Ron Carlson
            7.         Stirring Up a Fiction Stew
            8.         The Newspaper Muse: Ann Landers and the National Enquirer
            9.         Taking Risks

PART TWO
Characterization
            10.       Oh! . . . That Sort of Person
            11.       What Do You Know About Your Characters?
            12.       Props
            13.       What Do Your Characters Want?
            14.       Making Heroes Flawed, from Douglas Bauer
            15.       Creating a Character’s Background, Place, Setting, and Milieu, from Robie Macauley
            16.       Put Your Characters to Work
            17.       The Morning After
            18.       He/She: Switching Gender

PART THREE
Perspective, Distance, and Point of View
            19.       First Person or Third
            20.       John Gardner on Psychic Distance
            21.       Shifts in Point of View
            22.       An Early Memory, Part One: The Child as Narrator
            23.       An Early Memory, Part Two: The Reminiscent Narrator
            24.       The Unreliable Narrator
            25.       Family Stories, Family Myths

PART FOUR
Dialogue
            26.       Speech Flavor, or Sounding Real, from Thalia Selz
            27.       Telling Talk: When to Use Dialogue or Summarized Dialogue
            28.       Who Said That?
            29.       The Invisible Scene: Interspersing Dialogue with Action
            30.       A Verbal Dance: Not Quite a Fight

PART FIVE
The Interior Landscape of Your Characters
            31.       The Interior Landscape of Vision and Obsession
            32.       What Mayhem or Scene Is Happening Elsewhere?
            33.       “I Know Just What She’ll Say”
            34.       Mixed Motives and Maybes
            35.       The Need to Know: The Solace of Imagination
            36.       The Inside/Outside Story
           37.       Five Years from Now…..
            38.       Dream Work
            39.       The Power of “Seemed” and “Probably”

PART SIX
Plot
            40.       The Skeleton
            41.       From Situation to Plot
            42.       Peter Rabbit and Adam and Eve: The Elements of Plot, from Thomas Fox Averill
            43.       What If? How to Develop and Finish Stories
            44.       There’s a Party and You’re Invited, from Margot Livesey
            45.       So, What Happened?
            46.       Flash Forward: or Little Did I Know
            47.       Plot Potential
            48.       Back Story as Narrative Summary: Who’s Coming to Stay the Night
            49.       The End Foretold

PART SEVEN
The Elements of Style
            50.       A Style of Your Own, from Rod Kessler
            51.       Taboos: Weak Adverbs and Adjectives
            52.       Word Packages Are Not Gifts
            53.       Practice Writing Good, Clean Prose, from Christopher Keane

PART EIGHT
A Writer’s Toolbox
            54.       Handling the Problems of Time and Pace, from Robie Macauley
            55.       The Pet Story: Exposition, from Ron Carlson
            56.       Bringing Abstract Ideas to Life
            57.       Transportation: Getting There isn’t Half the Fun—It’s Boring
            58.       Naming the Diner, Naming the Diet, Naming the Dog
            59.       Transitions: Or White Space Does Not a Transition Make
            60.       How to Keep a Narrative Moving Forward
            61.       Noises Off: The Beauty of Extraneous Sound, from Laurence Davies
            62.      Separating Author, Narrator, and Character, from Frederick Reiken
            63.       Time Travel
            64.       Stairs: Setting and Place
            65.       Titles and Keys

PART NINE
Invention and a Bit of Inspiration
            66.       Illustrations, from Margot Livesey
           67.       Bully
            68.       Far away Places
            69.      Story Swap: From Jordan Dann and the Aspen Writers’ Foundation
            70.       Humor: an Intact Frog
            71.       Sunday: Discovering Emotional Triggers
            72.       Kill the Dog
            73.       Five Different Versions: And Not One Is a Lie
            74.       What You Carry
            75.       Psycho: Creating Terror
            76.       One in the Hand
            77.       Notes and Letters
            78.       The Chain Story

PART TEN
Revision: Rewriting Is Writing
            79.       Opening Up Your Story
            80.       Gifts to Yourself
            81.       Show and Tell: There’s a Reason It’s Called Storytelling, from Carol-Lynn Marrazzo
            82.       A Little Gardening, A Little Surgery
            83.       Magnifying Conflict, from David Ray
            84.       What’s at Stake? from Ken Rivard
            85.       It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
            86.       The Double Ending: Two Points in Time
            87.       In-Class Revision

PART ELEVEN
Sudden, Flash, Micro, Nano: Writing the Short Short Story
            88.       Sudden Fiction, from James Thomas
            89.       Write a Story Using a Small Unit of Time
            90.       Solving for X, from Ron Carlson
            91.       The Journey of the Long Sentence
            92.       He said/She said: But About What!
            93.       Rules of the Game
            94.       Ten to One, from Hester Kaplan
            95.       Make a List
            96.       Questions. Some Answers
            97.       How to . . . . . .
            98.       Nanofictions

PART TWELVE
Learning from the Greats
            99.       Finding Inspiration in Other Sources—Poetry, Nonfiction, etc.
            100.     The Sky’s the Limit: Homage to Kafka and García Márquez, from Christopher Noël
            101.     Learning from the Greats
            102.     Borrowing Characters
            103.     What Keeps You Reading?
            104.     The Literary Scene Circa 1893, 1929, 1948, or?, from George Garrett

PART THIRTEEN
Notebooks, Journals, and Memory
            105.     Who Are You? Somebody!
            106.     People From the Past: Characters of the Future
            107.     An Image Notebook, from Melanie Rae Thon
            108.     Journal Keeping for Writers, from William Melvin Kelley
            109.     Creative Wrong Memory
            110.     Let Us Write Letters

PART FOURTEEN
A Collection of Short Short Stories

LINDA BREWER 20/20

ANTONIA CLARK Excuses I Have Already Used
BRIAN HINSHAW The Custodian
MARIETTE LIPPO Confirmation Names
MELISSA MCCRACKEN It Would’ve Been Hot
JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL My Mother’s Gifts
PAMELA PAINTER The New Year
GRACE PALEY Wants
BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS How Could a Mother
ELIZABETH TALLENT No One’s a Mystery
LUISA VALENZUELA Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye

PART FIFTEEN
A Collection of Short Stories
CHARLES BAXTER Gryphon
RON CARLSON Some of Our Work with Monsters
RAYMOND CARVER Cathedral
SANDRA CISNEROS Eleven
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM White Angel
DAGOBERTO GILB The Pillows
PAM HOUSTON How to Talk to a Hunter
HESTER KAPLAN WOULD YOU KNOW IT WASN’T LOVE?
BOBBIE ANN MASON Shiloh
THOMAS MCNEELY Sheep
ALICE MUNRO Five Points
ZZ Packer Brownies
RICHARD RUSSO The Whore’s Child
JENNIFER SHAFF Leave of Absence
KATE WHEELER Under the Roof

Selected Bibliography

About the Contributors of Exercises

Credits

Index

Caracteristici

Includes more than one hundred classroom-tested writing exercises to help students hone their writing craft.

Each exercise is introduced by a brief but informative essay on an aspect of writing fiction.

Organized by separate elements of fiction—characterization, dialogue, point of view, etc.—this text offers instructors flexibility and provides students with specific and focused writing practice.

Includes an anthology of more than 20 short stories (including short-short stories) with wide-ranging style and subject.

Features practical advice on how-to-write and how to revise fiction.

Includes more than one hundred classroom-tested writing exercises to help students hone their writing craft.

Caracteristici noi

New exercises. This edition will feature several new class-tested exercises that aim to improve your writing techniques and to enlarge your understanding of the art and craft of fiction.
New Student Examples. These examples provide you with models of work created by your peers. Many of these examples have gone on to be used in stories later published by our students.
Over 25% of the stories in the book's mini-anthology are new. Many stories have been replaced with new, highly teachable, contemporary selections to keep the text fresh and updated. These include works by ZZ Packer, Richard Russo, Dagoberto Gilb, Sandra Cisneros, and Bruce Holland Rogers. One story, “Leave of Absence,” by Jennifer Shaff went through several drafts in Painter’s Revision Workshop at Emerson College (see Exercise ____), and went on to be selected by Jane Smiley who edited Best New American Voices of 2006.
New Quotations. Writing-related quotations appear at the start and end of select chapters to inspire your writing and serve as signposts for your life as a fiction writer.

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