This book is chock-full of excellent tips to help you learn to write like the pros and create a compelling novel that sells. Not only that, but if you apply these tips to your manuscript, you'll save a lot of money on editing costs.Topics include: hooking readers in on your first pages, writing compelling action scenes, style blunders to avoid, showing instead of telling, streamlining cluttered sentences and paragraphs, avoiding repetitions, choosing words that nail it, varying your pacing, avoiding info dumps, smoothing out awkward structures, writing natural-sounding dialogue, expressing thoughts, showing character reactions, avoiding melodrama, finding your authentic voice, and more.

    It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.

    This little book is brief and easy to understand. It won’t bore you with mundane grammar rules or the crap you learn in English class, but offers concrete suggestions on how to improve your writing.From lighthearted pointers for beginners to hard-core truths about the craft, Put the Cat In the Oven is a must-have desk reference for anyone who refuses to put down the pen.

    

    This Live Wire Writer Guide presents a simple, effective technique to sharpen your hook, charge your scenes, and amplify your voice whether you're a beginner or an expert.Most writing manuals skirt craft questions with gimmicks and quick fixes rather than plugging directly into your story's power source. Energize your fiction and boost your career with a new characterization method that jumpstarts drafting, crafting, revision, and pitching.  skill-builders to intensify language, stakes, and emotion for your readers.  battle-tested solutions for common traps, crutches, and habits.  a dynamic story-planning strategy effective for plotters and pantsers.  ample examples and exercises to help you upgrade fiction in any genre.  Blast past overused tics and types with storycraft that busts your ruts and awes your audience. Whether you like to wing it or bring it, Verbalize offers a fresh set of user-friendly, language-based tools to populate your pages and lay the foundations of unforgettable genre fiction.

    There's not a writer alive, novice or master, who will not benefit from this book and fall in love with it. Cover to cover, this wise little book is riveting and delightful. Readers will turn to The Mindful Writer again and again as a source inspiration, guidance, and support.

    The bestselling grammar book has been updated and revised to include the latest and greatest on the basics and subtleties of English, and features a new chapter on the language of the Internet.

    How do you find the time to write? How do you keep momentum? How do you deal with the horror of showing anyone a single sentence of your work-in-progress? The answers remain fun and easy, and author Elizabeth Sims will take your hand, dispel your worries, and show you how it's done in this stress-free guide to accomplishing your dream of writing your book.In You've Got a Book in You, Elizabeth is that encouraging voice guiding you through the entire process, from finding the right time and place to gathering all of your creative tools to diving right in and getting it done--page by page, step by step. It's easier than you think, and it all starts right here, right now.

    William Faulkner was a postmaster. Stephen King taught high school English, John Grisham was an attorney, and Toni Morrison worked in publishing. Though romantic fantasies of the writing life don't often include a day job, the fact is that most writers have one.If you find yourself among them, stealing moments late at night, early in the morning, or on your lunch break to write, "The Nighttime Novelist" is your guide--on call any hour to help. Divided into quick mini lessons to make the most of your precious writing time, this book offers: Technique instruction that breaks down the elements of the novel--from crafting your protagonist to successful plotting and pacingHurdle lessons that help you anticipate and overcome roadblocks, so you can keep your productivity and your story on trackGoing Deeper explorations that provide guidance on the more nuanced aspects of storytelling, so you can take your work to the next level Try It Out assignments and more than 25 interactive worksheets that help you apply the lessons to your own project Whether you're just beginning your novel, wondering how to navigate its middle, or bringing it to a close, you'll find the instruction, exercises, and support you need to keep your story moving forward every time you sit down to write.

    Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.(back cover)

    In concrete terms it explains how you can create your own success and, in the process, entertain, delight, challenge, and uplift this generation and the ones to come.

    And now Jon Franklin, himself a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and undisputed master of the great American nonfiction short story, shares the secrets of his success. Franklin shows how to make factual pieces come alive by applying the literary techniques of complication/resolution, flashback, foreshadowing, and pace. He illustrates his points with a close analysis and annotation of two of his most acclaimed stories, so that the reader can see, step-by-step, just how they were created. This lively, easy-to-follow guid combines readability and excitement with the best of expository prose and illuminates the techniques that beginning journalists—and more experienced ones, too—will find immensely helpful:Stalking the true short storyDrafting an effective outlineStructuring the rough copyPolishing like a proand the tips, tools, and techniques that will put your stories on the cutting edge

    Using the insights gleaned from these clients, as well as her own personal story, Sapala shows us how the experience of the intuitive writer can be radically different from the norm. INFJ writers don’t think like anyone else, and their highly creative brains take a toll on them that they rarely share with the outside world. The INFJ Writer discusses such topics as:How an INFJ writer’s physical health is tied to their creative outputWhy INFJ writers are more likely to fall prey to addictionsWhen an INFJ writer should use their natural psychic ability to do their best creative workWhether looking to start writing again or to finish the novel/memoir they started so long ago, any writer with the self-awareness to identify themselves as highly sensitive and intuitive will benefit from this book that helps them to find their own magic, and to finally use it to build the creative life that actually works for them.

    4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising and revising, and revising.More than a compendium of advice, Draft No. 4 is enriched by personal detail and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world, Draft No. 4 is the long-awaited master class given by America's most renowned writing instructor.

    [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From "Getting Started,' with "Short Assignments," through "Shitty First Drafts," "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue." all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses "Writers Block," "Writing Groups," and "Publication." Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.