There's more to it than just a detective, a dead body, and Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick. Fortunately, Larry Beinhart--Edgar Award-winning author of You Get What You Pay For, Foreign Exchange, and American Hero--has taken a break from writing smart, suspenseful thrillers to act as your guide through all the twists and turns of creating the twists and turns of a good mystery. Drawing on advice and examples from a host of the best names in mystery writing--from Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane to Scott Turow and Thomas Harris--plus some of his own prime plots, Larry Beinhart introduces you to your most indispensable partners in crime: *Character, plot, and procedure * The secrets to creating heroes, heroines, and villains ("All writers draw upon themselves and their experience. While the whole of yourself might not be capable of being either a serial killer or an FBI agent, there are parts in each of us that are capable of almost anything.") * The fine art of scripting the sex scene *The low-down on violence ("A crime novel without violence is like smoking pot without inhaling, sex without orgasm, or a hug without a squeeze." ) *And much more!From the opening hook to the final denouement, Larry Beinhart takes the mystery out of being a mystery writer.

    Based on the belief that writing successful fiction is a balance between making the right conscious choices and trusting one's own instincts, this text shows readers how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity.

    Free of generalizing platitudes, it instead focuses on the specifics of craft: from getting started, discovering characters, writing dialogue and description, to evaluating the design of a draft, and of course revision. Exercises found in this book are actual techniques working writers rely on. They include speed writing, sorting and grouping, rewriting an incident in various styles, experimenting with tone, voice, syntax, and more. Designed to cover every stage of the process—from brainstorming an idea to the final draft—these practical suggestions help writers to liberate their creativity and to refine existing work. Excerpts from published authors are also included and help to illustrate the techniques taught.

    When they’re not nodding, they roll their eyes.Time to slash the Pinocchio strings and turn them into real people. Award-winning author Kathy Steinemann provides the tools. She cuts through the so-called rules and offers simple solutions.Too many repetitions of “little”? There’s a cure for that. Do you rely on “very” too often? There’s a cure for that too. You’ll find the remedies in this book’s dispensary.Should you ever use anything other than “said” to attribute dialogue? Are exclamation points taboo? The answers might surprise you.Learn how to harness body language, purge hackneyed adjectives, and draw on the environment for ambience. No more wooden characters. You’ll transform them into believable personalities that your readers will learn to love. Or hate.Get in the driver’s seat, relax, and enjoy your journey—with Kathy Steinemann’s book as your GPS.

    As soon as you name an emotion, readers go into thinking mode. And when they think about an emotion, they distance themselves from feeling it. A great way to show anger, fear, indifference, and the whole range of emotions that characterize the human experience, is through beats. These action snippets that pepper dialogue can help describe a wide range of emotions while avoiding lazy writing. The power of beats lies in their innate ability to create richer, more immediate, deeper writing. This emotional thesaurus includes hundreds of examples that you can use for your inspiration, so that you, too, can harness this technique to easily convert your writing into palpable feelings. Genre fiction authors can use Emotional Beat as a feeling thesaurus and watch their writing take off! Emotional Beats was an award-winning Finalist in the IPA 2017 Awards.

    Extending this trend, Short Takes presents over seventy-five writers whose range and style demonstrate the myriad ways we humans have of telling our truths. Themes develop and speak to or collide with one another: musings about parents, childhood, sports, weather, war, solitude, nature, loss—and, of course, love. The stellar roster of contributors includes well-known writers—Verlyn Klinkenborg, Jo Ann Beard, David Sedaris, Dorothy Allison, Salman Rushdie, and Terry Tempest Williams—along with Michael Perry, Mark Spragg, Jane Brox, and others whose literary stars are clearly rising. Each short—whether a few paragraphs or reaching 2,000 words, and reflecting almost every way nonfiction can be written—invites us to experience the power of the small to move, persuade, and change us.

    This free Kindle book features interviews, essays, excerpts, and other fun extras about the year’s top 20 titles: Donna Tartt talks about her eating habits while writing The Goldfinch; Khaled Hosseini’s publicist discusses what it’s like to be on a national tour with him; David Finkel discusses the emotional impact following the 2-16 infantry battalion in Thank You for Your Service; and much more.

    Perfect for busy writers or writers who are easily distracted or who want a better way to make consistent progress with their writing. Includes write ups from 15-minute writers who swear by the method. Also covers mindset, getting into a writing flow, how to clear mental clutter so you can focus during your writing session, and more.

    . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets.Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.

    Contains annotations, plots, interviews, and scripts by many of comics' hottest writers, including Kurt Busiek, Neil Gaiman, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith, Jeff Smith, Marv Wolfman, and more.

    In this text, two well respected poets bring their love of the craft of poetry into a book that teaches as well as inspires. The text also includes exercises, chapter summaries, games, diagrams, illustrations, and 4-color reproductions of great works of art.

    

    Emphasizing both the coherence and the diversity of English metrical practice from Chaucer's time to ours, Timothy Steele explains how poets harmonize the fixed units of meter with the variable flow of idiomatic speech, and examines the ways in which poets have used meter, rhyme, and stanza to communicate and enhance meaning. Steele illuminates as well many practical, theoretical, and historical issues in English prosody, without ever losing sight of the fundamental pleasures, beauties, and insights that fine poems offer us. Written lucidly, with a generous selection of helpful scansions and explanations of the metrical effects of the great poets of the English language, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is not only a valuable handbook on technique; it is also a wide-ranging study of English verse and a mine of entertaining information for anyone wishing more fully to write, enjoy, understand, or teach poetry.

    The Complete Guide to Article Writing provides a compass for freelancers and students of journalism looking to write successfully on a wide variety of topics and for many different markets -both in print and online. From researching and interviewing to writing features, reviews, news articles, opinion pieces, and even blog posts, this one-stop guide will illuminate the intricacies of article writing so you can produce entertaining, informative, and salable articles.- Learn how to write coherently, cohesively, and concisely.- Choose the proper structure for the article you want to write.- Weave narrative and fact seamlessly into your pieces.- Develop your freelance platform with the latest in social media outlets.- Pitch your ideas like a pro.- Develop a professional relationship with editors.- And much more!Modern journalism can be a treacherous terrain, but with The Complete Guide to Article Writing as your companion, you'll not only survive the journey -you'll be able to write pieces that inform, entertain, inspire, delight- and sell!

    Defined in alphabetical order, each entry is allotted 1-7 pages with examples and histories of-and ideas for using-each form.