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February 9, 2010
Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
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Category: Fiction Writing Books
- ISBN13: 9781585425228
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A collection of personal writing exercises and commentary from some of today’s best novelists, short story writers, and writing teachers, including Jill McCorkle, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Virgil Su‡rez, Margot Livesey, and more.
What’s the secret behind the successful and prolific careers of critically acclaimed novelists and short story writers Amy Bloom, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alison Lurie, and others? Divine assistance? Otherworldly talent? An unsettlingly close relationship with the Muse? While the rest of us are staring at blank sheets of paper, struggling to come up with a first sentence, these writers are busy polishing off story after story and novel after novel. Despite producing work that may seem effortless, all of them have a simple technique for fending off writer’s block: the writing exercise. In Now Write!, Sherry Ellis collects the personal writing exercises of today’s best writers and lays bare the secret to their success.
- In “The Photograph,” Jill McCorkle divulges one of her tactics for handling material that takes plots in a million different directions; – National Book Award-nominee Amy Bloom offers “Water Buddies,” an exercise for writers practicing their craft in workshops; – Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and Candyfreak, provides a way to avoiding purple prose in “The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register”; – and eighty-three more of the country’s top writers disclose their strategies for creating memorable prose.
Complemented by brief commentary from the authors themselves, the exercises in Now Write! are practical and hands-on. By encouraging writers to shamelessly steal proven techniques that have yielded books which have won National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and Guggenheim grants, Now Write! inspires the aspiring writer to write now.
Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers
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I walked away with two very good ideas. There seems to be a deluge of this type of book right now. Tips and hints from a multitude of people that may, or may not, work for you. I’m waiting for the one that points out, on every page, that while you’re reading it you aren’t actually writing.
Rating: 3 / 5
I bought this book both as a resource for myself and as a resource for a class I have been teaching in Creative Writing. There are often only so many exercises one can think of for themselves in order to get the juices flowing, but I found that a good portion of this book is helpful. Some of the exercises are geared solely towards older people, i.e. ages 18+. The class I teach is geared for children and thus some of the exercises are just beyond- the exercises that require you to recall a memory, a 10 year old doesn’t have too many stored up yet. It’s a good book, and I would definitely recommend purchasing it, however think about the age requirements you have before doing so.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book woke up our writing group. We are using the exercises to expand our writing skills and have fun doing it. What a great selection of authors and styles. Great for workshops or just to stimulate your writing on any given day.
Rating: 5 / 5
Edited by personal writing coach Sherry Ellis, Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers is a carefully selected collection of writing exercises from some of today’s most acclaimed fiction writers such as Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Virgil Suarez, and more. From activities just to get motivated practicing writing, to ones focusing on point of view, character development, dialogue, plot and pacing, setting and description, revisions, and more, Now Write! focuses on ideas to get aspiring and practicing writers’ creative juices flowing, or engage in activities such as learning to identify the distinctions between real dialogue and smooth, fictional dialogue. Prefacing each idea is a couple pages of solid advice and concepts to keep in mind when crafting the next potential masterpiece. A highly recommended, practical guide for any aspiring writer seeking to take independent study to the next level.
Rating: 5 / 5
Writing is both an art and a science.
The art comes from the invention you have to make of creating a character, a situation, a story that exists only in your own mind and getting that vision onto paper. It’s this art, this ability to see a Mona Lisa on a piece of canvas, a David in a block of marble, a novel in a pile of paper that sets the writer aside from the rest of us. This is extremely difficult to teach.
The science of writing is a series of hints, tips, rules, procedures or whatever you choose to call them that have been developed over the years to enable the writer to produce work of the best quality he can. The science of writing is what this book is all about.
The author has worked with eighty-seven writers who have developed techniques to help them with their own writing. They are written in the form of exercises for the reader to do to help him find the ones that will help him write.
Rating: 5 / 5