Live your best life. Make your greatest impact.You have everything you need--and you are everything you need--to do the writing you are meant to do. And yet the path to success can be difficult to find and follow.Veteran author and writing guide Sage Cohen believes that ferocity is your best compass for finding your true way forward. She shows you how to transform your attitude and practices so you can:- Unleash your creativity - Cultivate your strengths - Overcome resistance, fear, and other obstacles - Define success on your own terms - Move intentionally toward your goals - Become unstoppable in your evolutionIn this collection of contemplative and inspiring essays, you'll unlock the secrets to naming your deepest desires, eliminating the challenges that hold you back, and committing to your practice. Fierce on the Page is your trustworthy companion for crafting your best writing and your best life.Join the conversation about the fierce writing life at fierceonthepage.com.

    Have hope and keep at it! Designed to kick-start creativity, this handsome handbook from the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) gathers a wide range of insights and advice for writers at any stage of their career. From tips about how to finally start that story to helpful ideas about what to do when the words just aren't quite coming out right, Pep Talks for Writers provides motivation, encouragement, and helpful exercises for writers of all stripes.

    Includes writing exercises and advice. A Hugo and Locus award winner.

    "Writing Hard Stories" encourages all writers as they work through their challenging stories. It features some of the country s most admired writers discussing their treks through dark memories and breakthrough moments, and it demonstrates the healing power of putting words to experience. A unique compilation of authentic stories about the death of a partner, parent, or child; about violence and shunning; and about the process of writing, the book will serve as a tool for teachers of writing and give readers an intimate look into the lives of the authors they love."

    For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Some entries include sample journal entries that have since developed into published pieces. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hardy endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer's creative spark. Designed for writers of all genres and all levels of experience, Writers and Their Notebooks celebrates the notebook as a vital tool in a writer's personal and literary life.

    Then learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend.”  In The Hidden Machinery, critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author Margot Livesey offers a masterclass for those who love reading literature and for those who aspire to write it. Through close readings, arguments about craft, and personal essay, Livesey delves into the inner workings of fiction and considers how our stories and novels benefit from paying close attention to both great works of literature and to our own individual experiences. Her essays range in subject matter from navigating the shoals of research to creating characters that walk off the page, from how Flaubert came to write his first novel to how Jane Austen subverted romance in her last one. As much at home on your nightstand as it is in the classroom, The Hidden Machinery will become a book readers and writers return to over and over again.

    "They aren't laws. They're an array of choices, things to try, once you've put a name to the particular problem you're facing now."That's what this book is about: identifying those choices (whose viewpoint? stop and explain now, or wait? how can this lead to that?), then learning what narrative problems they are apt to create and how to choose an effective strategy for solving them. The result? Strong, solid stories and novels that move.Inside you'll discover how to:test a story idea (using four simple questions) to see if it worksconvince your reader that not only is something happening, but that something's going to happen and it all matters intenselyhandle viewpoint shifts, flashbacks, and other radical jumps in your storyline weave plots with subplotsget ready for and write your Big Scenesbalance scene and summary narration to produce good pacinghandle the extremes of melodrama by "faking out" your readers--making them watch your right hand while your left hand is doing something sneakyform subtle patterns with mirror characters and echoing incidentschoose the best type of ending--linear or circular, happy or downbeat, or (with caution!) a trick endingWhether your fiction is short or long, subtle or direct, you'll learn to build strong plots that drive compelling, unforgettable stories your readers will love.

    This book provides all the information, guidance, and advice you need to write great science fiction to captivate your readers. It will help you understand how the genre works, the big dos and don'ts - as well as giving you the inspiration and motivation you actually need to write. Written by a leading Science Fiction novelist and a Professor in Creative Writing at the University of London - you'll discover how to let your creativity flow, create incredible worlds, and get your novel finished.ABOUT THE SERIESThe Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

    Talent and inspiration can't be taught, but Frey does provide scores of helpful suggestions and sensible rules and principles.An international bestseller, How to Write a Damn Good Novel will enable all writers to face that intimidating first page, keep them on track when they falter, and help them recognize, analyze, and correct the problems in their own work.

    Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.   Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.