But many writers struggle to understand this powerful principle or have difficulty applying it to their own work. Even experienced authors sometimes don’t grasp the finer nuances of showing and telling. In this book, Sandra Gerth draws on her experience as an editor and a best-selling author to show you how to show and tell you when to tell. Each chapter includes concrete examples and exercises that will hone your writing skills. Whether you’re a novice writer working on your first story or an established author who has already learned the basics of showing and telling, this book will help you to: - Grasp the difference between showing and telling. - Understand why showing is such a powerful tool. - Spot telling in your own manuscript. - Fix bland passages and turn them into compelling scenes. - Keep from telling what you have already shown. - Avoid the three danger areas of telling. - Describe your characters and your setting in interesting ways. - Put powerful emotions into your writing. - Incorporate backstory into your novel without resorting to telling. - Recognize telling in dialogue. - Avoid overshowing and swamping your readers with too many details. - Learn when telling is actually a good thing. - Immerse your readers into your story and keep them captivated from beginning to end.

    Proofreading Secrets of Best-Selling Authors, by professional freelance author, editor, and proofreader Kathy Ide, is the essential go-to tool for aspiring and experienced writers and editors. This book includes all of the material from Ide's popular Polishing the PUGS book (now out of print), with added PUGS guidelines and helpful tips from multi-published authors on how to catch typos and other common mistakes. In Proofreading Secrets of Best-Selling Authors, Kathy Ide identifies the industry-standard references for books, magazines, and newspapers (which are different from the guidelines for other types of writing, such as college term papers). Using these official references, she highlights the most common mistakes writers make in the areas of punctuation, usage, grammar, and spelling (for which she uses the acronym PUGS). She also includes guidelines from The Christian Writer's Manual of Style for authors and editors who work in the inspirational market.

    The ups and downs of writing life—including self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

    Throughout, the emphasis is on promoting a plain English style. This little book can help you communicate more effectively by showing you how to enliven your sentences.

    With more than twenty-five years of experience teaching creative writing between them, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter offer more than seventy-five exercises for both beginners and more experienced writers. These exercises are designed to develop and refine two basic skills: writing like a writer and, just as important, thinking like a writer. They deal with such topics as discovering where to start and end a story; learning when to use dialogue and when to use indirect discourse; transforming real events into fiction; and finding language that both sings and communicates precisely. What If? will be an essential addition to every writer's library, a welcome and much-used companion, a book that gracefully borrows a whisper from the muse.

    Readers will learn how to adopt those habits on their quest to become novelists. The book will inspire, nourish, and provide the needed kick in the pants to turn the wannabes into doers! The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists is full of "aha" experiences as the reader uncovers the collected wisdom from the cream of today’s fiction writers.

    "You need tools, not rules." His book distills decades of experience into 50 tools that will help any writer become more fluent and effective. WRITING TOOLS covers everything from the most basic ("Tool 5: Watch those adverbs") to the more complex ("Tool 34: Turn your notebook into a camera") and provides more than 200 examples from literature and journalism to illustrate the concepts. For students, aspiring novelists, and writers of memos, e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, and love letters, here are 50 indispensable, memorable, and usable tools. "Pull out a favorite novel or short story, and read it with the guidance of Clark's ideas. . . . Readers will find new worlds in familiar places. And writers will be inspired to pick up their pens." -Boston Globe"For all the aspiring writers out there-whether you're writing a novel or a technical report-a respected scholar pulls back the curtain on the art." -Atlanta Journal-Constitution"This is a useful tool for writers at all levels of experience, and it's entertainingly written, with plenty of helpful examples." -Booklist

    There are a thousand of those out there and you've read them all.What this book is: a mindset shift book. If you want to stay in this industry, there are some things you need to quit. And I'm not going to tell you "how", but I am going to tell you why.

    Through encouraging coaching, shared memories, and open-ended questions, the process of producing a personal history becomes intriguing and engaging.With Legacy the possibilities expand: a personal record is preserved—with its myths, traditions, joys, pains, gains, and losses; a family opens a potential dialogue that will last for generations; the writer has an opportunity for insight and resolution; the culture of a time and place is noted; the tradition of personal story is revitalized, and our present and future find nourishment and knowledge in the past.Either as a gift that can act as a shared experience as the memories are recounted or as a personal way to take account of one’s experiences, often long since forgotten, Legacy is indeed a way to get one’s story down.

    Here, Peter Elbow emphasizes that the essential activities underlying good writing and the essential exercises promoting it are really not difficult at all.Employing a cookbook approach, Elbow provides the reader (and writer) with various recipes: for getting words down on paper, for revising, for dealing with an audience, for getting feedback on a piece of writing, and still other recipes for approaching the mystery of power in writing. In a new introduction, he offers his reflections on the original edition, discusses the responses from people who have followed his techniques, how his methods may differ from other processes, and how his original topics are still pertinent to today's writer. By taking risks and embracing mistakes, Elbow hopes the writer may somehow find a hold on the creative process and be able to heighten two mentalities--the production of writing and the revision of it.From students and teachers to novelists and poets, Writing with Power reminds us that we can celebrate the uses of mystery, chaos, nonplanning, and magic, while achieving analysis, conscious control, explicitness, and care in whatever it is we set down on paper.

    But as any writer can tell you, the blank page can be daunting. It's tough to know where to get started, what details to include in each scene, and how to move from the kernel of an idea to a completed manuscript. Writing great fiction isn't a gift reserved for the talented few. There is a craft to storytelling that can be learned, and studying writing techniques can be incredibly rewarding - both personally and professionally. Even if you don’t have ambitions of penning the next Moby-Dick, you'll find value in exploring all the elements of fiction. From evoking a scene to charting a plot to revising your drafts, Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques offers a master class in storytelling. Taught by award-winning novelist James Hynes, a former visiting professor at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, these 24 insightful lectures show you the ins and outs of the fiction writer's craft. Get tips for developing believable and memorable characters, explore how to craft plausible dialogue that serves the purposes of your narrative, compare the advantages of different points of view, and more. A wealth of exercises will inspire you to practice the many techniques you learn. Professor Hynes is an able guide, showing you what has worked for him and other novelists, and pointing out pitfalls to avoid. Writing Great Fiction is truly an exceptional course for anyone interested in storytelling.©2014 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2014 The Great Courses

    "Every author can find something to add to their writing process from reading this book.." - A. Davis "...felt like having a cup of good coffee with a friend and learning from his experience." - K. Struggling to finish your novels? Learn how to tweak your workflow process and write one in only FIVE DAYS! After taking way too long to write a fantasy epic, author and educator Scott King refined his writing process so that he could crank out a novel in five days! Through easy-to-follow tips and helpful examples, Scott takes a theme and shapes an entire story around it. Let him walk you through the prewriting process, slogging through a first draft, and doing the rewrites. In this book, you’ll learn: How to get in the right mindset How to cut distractions & manage your time The ingredients necessary to form a story How to stay focused and keep writing How to plan your rewrites The things to look for when line editing If you like honesty, no bull, a bunch of humor, and tons of examples in your writing guides, then you’ll love Scott King’s behind-the-scenes look at how to write a novel in five days. Buy THE 5 DAY NOVEL today and start writing tomorrow!

    Keep Playing. Keep Creating. In his previous books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, both New York Times bestsellers, Austin Kleon gave readers the keys to unlock their creativity and showed them how to become known. Now he offers his most inspiring work yet, with ten simple rules for how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself—for life. The creative life is not a linear journey to a finish line, it’s a loop—so find a daily routine, because today is the only day that matters. Disconnect from the world to connect with yourself—sometimes you just have to switch into airplane mode. Keep Going celebrates getting outdoors and taking a walk (as director Ingmar Bergman told his daughter, ”The demons hate fresh air”). Pay attention, and especially pay attention to what you pay attention to. Worry less about getting things done, and more about the worth of what you’re doing. Instead of focusing on making your mark, work to leave things better than you found them.Keep Going and its timeless, practical, and ethical principles are for anyone trying to sustain a meaningful and productive life.

    Brimming with examples, quotes, and case studies that include an illuminating discussion of Max Perkins's editorial collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby, this book proves how fundamental editing is to great writing. Bell also offers strategic tips and exercises for self-editing, and a series of remarkable interviews, that take us into the studios of established authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Tracy Kidder, and Ann Patchett to learn from their various approaches to shaping their work after its initial creation. Much more than a manual, The Artful Edit inspires readers to think about both the discipline and the creativity of editing and how editing can enhance their work. A vigorous investigation into the history and meaning of the edit, this book, like The Triggering Town and The Elements of Style, is a must-have companion for every writer.

    This title explains the fundamentals of strong scene construction and how other useful fiction-writing techniques, such as character development, description, and transitions must function within the framework of individual scenes.