Secrets of the World's Bestselling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner


Book Description

All the hard-earned storytelling skills of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Petty Mason and still the world’s biggest-selling writer, are revealed in this informative, entertaining, and instructive book. The authors clearly present and analyze all the elements of narrative-character, plot, conflict, and resolution-as Gardner used them. Numerous extraordinary charts, diagrams , and outlines makes his hard-earned technical skills available to the reader in practical and useful forms. This book is ideal for Gardner collectors and fans, and equally for students of writing at all levels-would be writers, neophytes, and even published authors-for it offers one of the most practical and professional courses ever in storytelling technique.




Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer


Book Description

All the hard-earned storytelling skills of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason and one of the best-selling writers of all time, are revealed in this informative, entertaining, and instructive book. The authors clearly present and analyze all the elements of narrative character, plot, conflict, and resolution as Gardner used them. Numerous extraordinary charts, diagrams, and outlines makes his hard-earned technical skills available to the reader in practical and useful forms. This book is ideal for Gardner collectors and fans, and equally for students of writing at all levels would-be writers, neophytes, and even published authors for it offers one of the most practical and professional courses ever in storytelling technique.




Perplexing Plots


Book Description

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.




The Typewriter Century


Book Description

This book captures the intensity of the relationship between writers and their typewriters from the 1880s, when the machine was first commercialized, to the 1980s, when word-processing superseded it. Drawing on examples from the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia, The Typewriter Century focuses on "celebrity writers," including Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote prolifically and mechanically, developing routines in which typing, handwriting, and dictation were each allotted important functions. The typewriter de-personalized the text; the office typewriter bureaucratized it. At the same time, some authors found a new and disturbing distance between themselves and their compositions while others believed the typewriter facilitated spontaneous and automatic typing. The Typewriter Century provides a cultural history of the typewriter, outlining the ways in which it can be considered an agent of change as well as demonstrating how it influenced all writers, canonical and otherwise.




American Mystery and Detective Novels


Book Description

Mystery and detective novels are popular fictional genres within Western literature. As such, they provide a wealth of information about popular art and culture. When the genre develops within various cultures, it adopts, and proceeds to dominate, native expressions and imagery. American mystery and detective novels appeared in the late nineteenth century. This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction. The guide is divided into five major sections: a brief history, related genres, criticism, authors, and reference. This organization accounts for the literary history and types of novels stemming from the mystery and detective genre. A chronology provides a helpful overview of the development and transformation of the genre.




Mystery Fanfare


Book Description

This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.




How to Write for the New Age Market


Book Description

This is a comprehensive, nuts-and-bolts guide to writing for New Age publications by one of today's bestselling new Age authors.




Writing Mysteries


Book Description

Here's your ticket to the greatest mystery-writing workshop ever! In this extraordinary compilation, more than three dozen members of the Mystery Writers of America share insights and advice that can help make your writing dreams a reality. You'll learn how to: • Develop unique ideas • Construct an airtight plot packed with intrigue and suspense • Create compelling characters and atmospheric settings • Develop a writing style all your own • Write convincing dialogue • Choose the appropriate point of view • Work with an agent • Conduct accurate research • and much, much more! You'll also find special guidelines for creating clues, dropping red herrings, and writing medical, legal, historical, true crime, and young adult mysteries. It's all the information you need to solve the mystery-writing riddle!




The Making of a Bestseller


Book Description

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's career itself is a metaphor for the vagaries of book publishing. If Fitzgerald would have had his way, we would today refer to The Great Gatsby as either Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg, or The High-Bouncing Lover. A few years before Gatsby, Fitzgerald had become a literary sensation at the age of 23; Helen Hooven Santmyer, a contemporary of Fitzgerald's, would not have a successful novel published until she was 88 and living in a nursing home. In this book, the author explores that mysterious place in publishing where art and commerce can either clash, mesh, or both. Along the way, a wide range of authors--from the literary greats to today's commercial superstars--editors, agents and publishers share their thoughts, insights and experiences: What inspires writers? (John Steinbeck, for example, wrote every novel as if it were his last, as if death were imminent.) Why are some books successful and appreciated, while others fall into oblivion? The answers are often elusive, never absolute, but the stories and anecdotes are always fascinating.




The Productive Indie Fiction Writer: Strategies for Writing More, Earning More, and Living Well


Book Description

The Productive Indie Fiction Writer Strategies for Writing More, Earning More, and Living Well Proven tactics from an author of 200+ fiction titles. Is your indie writing business overwhelming you? Are you flailing, looking for the way to increase your revenue? Are you constantly buying courses, watching webinars and wondering how to get ahead? There is so much information available for indies that, often, we don’t know where to start or who to trust. Dip into The Productive Indie Fiction Writer and learn how to deal with everything that comes at you on a daily basis. Get back control of your writing career not by adopting yet another system, or buying yet another expensive technological solution, but by going back to basics. Get organized. Get a handle on your writing business…and your life. Writing, Research & Publishing Guides | Publishing & Books | Authorship ___ Praise for Tracy’s The Productive Indie Fiction Writer blog: Great blog, Tracy! And, yup, I’m more prolific now than ever before. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this post up even while you’re going through all of that! it was exactly what I needed to read right now. …thank you for this post and for all the other posts that I’ve read on here! it helps me finish off this year knowing that I’m not alone in struggling with creative output under pressure, This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing your tips. You’re an inspiration, so keep doing what you’re doing! WOW, even in this stressful time you’re still on top of it. Man you are so full of all kinds of information. As always, I found this very interesting and enlightening. ____ Tracy Cooper-Posey is a prolific indie fiction writer with over 200 titles published. Her books have been nominated four times for Book Of The Year. Tracy won the award in 2012, and a SFR Galaxy Award in 2016 for “Most Intriguing Philosophical/Social Science Questions in Galaxybuilding.” She has been a national magazine editor and for a decade she taught romance writing at MacEwan University. She is the owner and sole content writer of The Productive Indie Fiction Writer blog, the publisher at Stories Rule Press, and manages the content for four author sites. The Productive Indie Fiction Writer book is her first non-fiction book for writers. She is addicted to Irish Breakfast tea and chocolate, sometimes taken together. In her spare time she enjoys history, Sherlock Holmes, science fiction and ignoring her treadmill. An Australian Canadian, she lives in Edmonton, Canada with her husband, a former professional wrestler, where she moved in 1996 after meeting him on-line.