The Playful Way to Serious Writing


Book Description

Drawing on extensive experience in teaching creative writing and a lifetime of free artistic expression, Roberta Allen, novelist, short story writer, and author of "Fast Fiction, " has created a unique book of writing exercises packed with hundreds of verbal directives and visual cues.




Stairway to Earth: How to Writer a Serious Book


Book Description

Stairway to Earth: How to Write a Serious Book is a book dedicated to helping authors write superb manuscripts.Veteran book consultant Bill Birchard details his unique 14-step process to writing serious nonfiction. Among the topics covered: How to craft a crisp book message. How to structure an argument into a progression of logical chapters. How to organize a research program and manage a flood of reference documents. How to craft a book proposal that agents and publishers find irresistible. How to draft a superb first, second, and final draft without wasting countless hours in rewriting.For both new and seasoned authors, Stairway to Earth provides the secret for mastering book development. The book is packed with tips and secrets to make the job go easier and quicker. Birchard reveals story after story with insights from years of hands-on experience. For would-be authors who know they are destined to write a book, Stairway is the indispensible guide.




The Playful Way to Knowing Yourself


Book Description

With an eye toward building self-awareness, Allen employs her signature combination of verbal directives and visual cues in a dynamic workbook that prompts readers to look at themselves from many different angles and perspectives. 78 halftones. Consumable.




Writing Out the Storm


Book Description

This powerful and deeply inspirational handbook is for anyone coping with serious illness or injury-be it theirs or that of a loved one-who wants and needs to help themselves through the healing process. Offering her own experience with breast cancer, as well as stories from other authors who have suffered from illnesses or severe injuries-from Stephen King to Lance Armstrong-Abercrombie encourages readers to write what is in their hearts and to benefit from the power of shared experience. Using writing as therapy, Writing Out the Storm is a book about healing the soul.




Fast Fiction


Book Description

Set a timer for five minutes, select one of the more than 300 "prompts" at random, then immediately start writing and don't stop until time is up. The rules of Fast Fiction are simple; the results, liberating. By telling you what to write about ("write a story about a coward", "...warmth", or "...a whisper"), the timed exercises focus all your energies on the telling. By imposing a deadline, they force you to write spontaneously, bypassing the inner critic and allowing your voice - as well as surprising images and associations - to emerge on the page. Step by step, Allen shows how to turn your five-minute writings into short short stories - intense fictions that use language with power and precision. She then shows you how to use the timed exercises to built longer stories and novels. You'll see, for example, how one of her students turned eight of his exercises into a chapter for his novel. By looking at your fiction a piece at a time, the writing process becomes less intimidating and more open to experiment. Allen illustrates all the possibilities with examples of students' work, as well as a variety of published shorts - from classics by Anton Chekhov and Robert Walser to contemporary pieces by Joyce Carol Oates and Mark Strand.




Games for Writing


Book Description

A collection of games and activities designed to help children improve their writing skills.




Write-A-Thon


Book Description

Find the focus, energy, and drive you need to start—and finish—your book Everyone has dreamed of writing a book, but so many start writing only to stall out due to writer’s block, mental fatigue, and other challenges. Write-A-Thon helps you overcome those stumbling blocks and complete your book once and for all. And you don’t have to type away for years on end. Here’s a plan that’ll help you write your book—in twenty-six days! Write-A-Thon gives you the tools, advice, and inspiration you need to succeed before, during, and after your writing race. Solid instruction, positive psychology, and inspiration from marathon runners will give you the momentum to take each step from here to the finish line. • Start out well prepared: Learn how to train your attitude, your writing, and your life—and plan your novel or nonfiction book. • Maintain your pace: Get advice and inspiration to stay motivated and keep writing. • Bask in your accomplishment: Find the best ways to recover and move forward once the marathon is over and you have a completed manuscript in hand. Writing a book in twenty-six days may seem impossible—especially if you don’t write full time—but in Write-A-Thon, Rochelle Melander will teach you the life skills, performance techniques, and writing tools you need to finish your manuscript in less than a month—guaranteed!




Playful Approaches to Serious Problems


Book Description

The authors describe their success with narrative therapy, a lighter, playful approach to the serious problems encountered in child and family therapy. They provide case vignettes in the first two sections which show how children who might have been labeled belligerent, hyperactive, anxious, or out of touch with reality are found to be capable of taming their tempers, controlling frustration, and using their imaginations to the fullest. They address the helpful role of family members, as well. The third section of the text offers five extended case stories. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Revenge of the Scapegoat


Book Description

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross—the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical—and drawing upon documentary strategies from Sheila Heti, Caren Beilin offers a tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene. One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in profoundly serious ways.




Teaching Literature


Book Description

This book comprises reflections by experienced scholar teachers on the principles and practice of higher education English teaching. In approaching the subject from different angles it aims to spark insights and to foster imaginative teaching. In the era of audit, and the Teaching Excellence Framework it invites teachers to return to the sources of their own teaching knowledge. The shift from a student-centred to a research-centred paradigm has particular implications for a discipline which prides itself on its teaching, and has always had teaching and dialogue at its heart. One which also talks across the tertiary / secondary border to the cognate (though different) subject called ‘English’ in school. The argument which informs this book, and which is developed in the individual chapters, is that the future of the subject relies not alone upon fostering communities of ‘research excellence’, but on re-awakening and reviving its pedagogic traditions.




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