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This course is an introductory creative writing workshop with an emphasis on prose writing. It intends to help the students cultivate their sensitivity to the differences between English and Mandarin, acquaint them with basic writing craft, and give them a broad introduction to creative practice in fiction writing. The first half of the course will focus on the micro aspects of prose writing (how to order words for emphasis, how to understand the true meaning of tense etc.); the second half is geared towards examining storytelling in a macro scope (character orchestration, storytelling structure etc.).
This book gives advice on being a writer while sharing the feelings and experiences the author has had being one herself- Lamott shares her experiences and offers counsel and encouragement on everything from getting a project started to knowing when it's done. Discussing elements of the craft such as character development, plot invention, and rewriting, much of the book is given over to solving the mental problems of writing, including chapters on false starts, writer's block, confidence and intuition, the tyranny of perfectionism, even a chapter on how to handle jealousy.
This book is a collection of 37 short stories written by Raymond Carver, one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Carver’s first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I’m Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This collection encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.
This book is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Tim O’Brian. It is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division. This book tells about the experiences of the men of Alpha Company during and after the Vietnam War. It is a classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. Tim O’Brian, the author, is often a character in the stories. Many of the other characters are semi-autobiographical, sharing similarities with figures from his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is a collection of 16 short stories by American novelist Aimee Bender. These are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped–and sometimes twisted–by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. See some of the stories: A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library; A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows; A woman falls in love with a hunchback, and when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him; etc.
This book is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Denis Johnson. All of the stories, set in the Midwest and West, are told by a single narrator, a young man hanging around a small town in the midwest, falling in with the drinkers and druggies and lost souls always lurking at the periphery of our quotidian consciousness. Each short story offers another vista on a lost, sorrowful American underworld where recurring characters stumble through dive bars, dead-end relationships, emergency rooms, car crashes, and petty crimes. The stories are linked by shared locations and repeated imagery.
This book sets forth eleven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of commonly misused words and expressions. The rules and principles are in the form of sharp commands such as “do not join independent clauses with a comma”, “do not break sentences in two”, and “use the active voice”, and each rule or principle is followed by a short hortatory essay. A chapter “An Approach to Style” is added by White to this edition to set forth notions of error and articles of faith. Example sentences show proper and improper usage.
This book offers more than 200 intriguing writing exercises designed to help users think, write, and revise. Users will learn how to transform staid and stale writing patterns into exciting experiments in fiction, shed the anxieties that keep users from reaching their full potential as a writer, craft unique ideas by combining personal experience with unrestricted imagination, examine and overcome all of their fiction writing concerns, from getting started to writer’s block. Users can combine these exercises in different ways, or put together stray elements from several different exercises in one piece.
This book, companion to The 3 A.M. Epiphany, presents another 200 stimulating exercises, designed to help users expand their understanding of the problems and processes of more complex, satisfying fiction and to challenge users to produce works. Users will learn how to train their writing instincts, so creation becomes a more organic, automatic process, tackle challenging concepts and themes, such as Language Games, The Mind, Money & Class, and History, laying a foundation for larger, more significant writing projects, and make their writing process more fun and experimental, so users will approach their fiction in the spirit of discovery, rather than with anxiety.
This book is a collection of essays on the craft of writing and the writer’s life. The book begins to explore how deniability has crept even into contemporary writing, robbing it of its interest and complexity. Then the book makes a strong case for reviving narratives with mindful villainy, and an imaginative grip on the despicable. Elsewhere, it delves into the short fiction of Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, and James Joyce to trace shadows of the antagonist and defends the guilty pleasures of this unserious mode now fallen out of fashion.
This book is a collection of interconnected short stories by Sherman Alexie. The book's central characters, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, are two young Native-American men living on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and the stories describe their relationships, desires, and histories with family members and others who live on the reservation. They are strongly aware of Native American traditions but wonder whether their ancestors view today’s Indians- mired in alcohol, violence, and an almost palpable sense of despair- with sympathy or disgust. They wonder about their salvation and what to do with themselves from day to day.
The 10 tales in this intense debut collection plunge us into the emotional lives of people redefining their American identity. It portrays young people waiting for transformation, waiting to belong. Their worlds generally consist of absent fathers, silent mothers and friends of questionable principles and morals. Narrated by adolescent Dominican males living in the struggling communities of the Dominican Republic, New York and New Jersey, these stories chronicle their outwardly cool but inwardly anguished attempts to recreate themselves in the midst of eroding family structures and their own burgeoning sexuality.
