The Write Quotes: Writing Process & Tools


Book Description

These inspirational and practical quotes come from 500+ podcast interviews with hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries. In Book 3, authors share their honest reflections on Writing Process & Tools. These quotes reveal answers to some of the most commonly asked questions of writers. Authors quoted include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, David Joy, Gavin Edwards, and many more. Where do you write? When do you write? Do you write every day? How many drafts do you write? Do you create an outline? Do you use an editor? Do you? Do you? Do you? Though the answers vary in these pages, there are common denominators. As author and writing instructor Maureen Ryan Griffin says, “We all start with a blank page.” And as David Baldacci puts it, “There’s no perfect place to write.” Writers make do with what they have to work with. Take author and columnist Scott Fowler, who has earned 18 national APSE writing awards. He says, “I don’t go off to the mountain to write. I just go upstairs.” Or, as professor, author, and editor Michele Berger says, “A long time ago I said to myself, I can write anytime, anywhere.” Humility seems to be helpful to getting it done. As New York Times bestselling novelist John Hart says, “If a writer becomes hubristic, or begins to take this for granted, or really just thinks he can roll out of bed and bang it out without a lot of effort, that's the first step on the road to destruction.”




Write Your Way In


Book Description

“Toor’s style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high.” —School Library Journal Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay. The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.




The Audacity of Sara Grayson


Book Description

What happens when the world’s greatest literary icon dies before she finishes the final book in her best-selling series? And what happens when she leaves that book in the hands of her unstable, neurotic daughter, who swears she’s not a real writer? Sara Grayson is a thirty-two-year-old greeting card writer about to land the toughest assignment of her life. Three weeks after the death of her mother—a world-famous suspense novelist—Sara learns that her mother’s dying wish is for her to write the final book in her bestselling series. Sara has lived alone with her dog, Gatsby, ever since her husband walked out with their Pro Double Waffle Maker and her last shred of confidence. She can’t fathom writing a book for thirty million fans—not when last week’s big win was resetting the microwave clock. But in a bold move that surprises even herself, Sara takes it on. Against an impossible deadline and a publisher intent on sabotaging her every move, Sara discovers that stepping into her mother’s shoes means stumbling on family secrets she was never meant to find—secrets that threaten her mother’s legacy and the very book she’s trying to create.




Light in August


Book Description

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.




The Write Quotes: Writing Techniques & Characters


Book Description

These inspirational and practical quotes come from 500+ podcast interviews with hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries. In Book 5, authors share their honest reflections on Writing Techniques & Characters. These quotes reveal how writers tackle the fiction techniques of the hook, emotion, theme, conflict, humor, plot, setting, and structure, and how they approach memoir, poetry, nonfiction, and short stories. They also focus on characters, point of view, and dialogue. Authors quoted include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Ron Rash, C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Jason Mott, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, Gavin Edwards, and many more. Because stories have to start somewhere, and so do quote books, this book starts with the section titled, “The Hook.” As author Matthew Duffus, Writing Center Director of Earlham College in Indiana, says, “We have so many options now for entertainment that we've got to be quick. We've got to hook readers and we've got to keep things moving.” Simply put, as award-winning novelist Jon Buchan quips, “We don’t write about the planes that land safely.” But there is more to a good story than the first few lines and the first chapter. That’s why this book has more sections and content than any other book in the series and why we get emotional about it. As award-winning author Randell Jones says, “A good personal story engages with real life. It has to be addressing some universal issue of the human condition, something that most readers can connect with.” Author Kathleen Burkinshaw agrees when she says, “Time can pass, technology will change, but the need for human connection through emotions, that's timeless.” Whatever form or genre you’re writing in, these quotes have something to support your journey through the world of wordcraft.




How to Read Like a Writer


Book Description

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?




Johnstown Flood


Book Description

The stunning story of one of America’s great disasters, a preventable tragedy of Gilded Age America, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough. At the end of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal. Graced by David McCullough’s remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.




Floor Sample


Book Description

An unflinching memoir by the woman who has helped thousands of people uncover their creative inspiration. In Floor Sample, the author of the international bestseller The Artist's Way weaves an honest and moving portrayal of her life. From her early career as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and her marriage to Martin Scorsese, to her tortured experiences with alcohol and Hollywood, Julia Cameron reflects in this engaging memoir on the experiences in her life that have fueled her own art as well as her ability to help others realize their creative dreams. She also describes the fascinating circumstances that led her to emerge as a central figure in the creative recovery movement-a movement that she inaugurated and defined with the publication of her seminal work, The Artist's Way. Julia Cameron is a passionate and wry observer of the world, and her account of her life as a self-described "floor sample" for all she teaches in her brilliant books on creativity will surprise, entertain, and inspire all her many fans as well as anyone interested in an absorbing literary memoir.




Tools for Thought


Book Description

In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay. The digital revolution did not begin with the teenage millionaires of Silicon Valley, claims Howard Rheingold, but with such early intellectual giants as Charles Babbage, George Boole, and John von Neumann. In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay. Taking the reader step by step from nineteenth-century mathematics to contemporary computing, he introduces a fascinating collection of eccentrics, mavericks, geniuses, and visionaries. The book was originally published in 1985, and Rheingold's attempt to envision computing in the 1990s turns out to have been remarkably prescient. This edition contains an afterword, in which Rheingold interviews some of the pioneers discussed in the book. As an exercise in what he calls "retrospective futurism," Rheingold also looks back at how he looked forward.




Premiership Psycho


Book Description

Kev King has the world at his feet. His is the world of top flight football: where brands are all, lifestyle is god, adoration is obligatory and there is nothing - and no one - that money can't buy. And up until last season, Kev had the Premier League status to match his premier lifestyle. Now, relegated to a lowly league, forced to watch injured from the bench, and paranoid about his girlfriend's rising celebrity profile, he feels less in control of his life. And it's making him angry. Fighting his way back to the top, he leaves a trail of destruction. But can his millions and his talent keep him at the top of his game - or are his violent secrets about to rob him of everything he has? C. M. Taylor's Premiership Psycho is a compelling, hilarious and horrible insight into celebrity culture and a brilliant fictional portrayal of contemporary football.