Product Description

A comprehensive guide for improving your creative writing. This coursebook takes aspiring writers through three stages of practice: gathering - getting started, learning how to keep notes, making observations and using memory; shaping - looking at structure, points of view, character and setting; and finishing - being your own critic, joining workshops, finding publishers. Throughout exercises and activities encourage writers to develop their skills. Contributions from forty authors provide a generous pool of information, experience and advice. This book should be of interest to those who are just starting to write as well as those who want some help honing work already completed. It should suit people writing for publication or just for their own pleasure, those writing on their own or writing groups.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3826 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Synopsis
A comprehensive guide for improving your creative writing. This coursebook takes aspiring writers through three stages of practice: gathering - getting started, learning how to keep notes, making observations and using memory; shaping - looking at structure, points of view, character and setting; and finishing - being your own critic, joining workshops, finding publishers. Throughout exercises and activities encourage writers to develop their skills. Contributions from forty authors provide a generous pool of information, experience and advice. This book should be of interest to those who are just starting to write as well as those who want some help honing work already completed. It should suit people writing for publication or just for their own pleasure, those writing on their own or writing groups.

About the Author
Julia Bell and Paul Magrs are both novelists and teachers of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia

Customer Reviews

The true craft - and graft - of writing
This book won't write your novel for you. It won't tell you how to get it published. But what it will do is guide new (and not so new) writers through the essentials.

If you have a great idea for a story and are basically literate, this book is a very good way to turn out an excellent book. It guides writers through the basics of plot and character, point of view and setting, and through to those final elements such as rewriting and editing many writers try to avoid. It is thorough and understandable, and, being written by a wide variety of accomplished professionals rather than just one know-it-all, it provides the best advice available from many sources.

It is often partnered with What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, and for good reason. What If adds valuable exercises to this book, and is worth buying alongside it.

This is not a short-cut to getting published. It is a rigorous manual containing many exercises that while maybe not appealing on first glance, are well worth doing. It is a guide to the true craft - and graft - of the writing process. Ironically, it is increasingly apparent that publishers and their editors have little knowledge of these building blocks of good writing. This book can make sure what you present for publication is as good as it should be; whether editors actually recognise that fact is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of even this terrific book.

Beside the point
I think some reviews of this book are beside the point - it's more of a course-book for people who go to "Creative Writing" courses at uiversity, or ideas for teachers of same rather than a book about how to improve technique. Neither do I have any quibble with its not being a WRITE FOR PROFIT! piece of puff that hopes to fleece naive hopefuls. That said, it's just not a very good course-book. Most of the "ideas for writing" are flat, flaccid or just plain time-wasting stuff for teachers to use in a crisis ("imagine your bedroom or a pair of shoes" twaddle, while Ali Smith's comparative sentence-matching exercises take "pointless" to a new level). It's not a book about what writing might mean in a wider context either. The whole book is beside the point. The best way to get a serious handle on how to write is to read and read as deeply as you can - genre fiction will not teach you much, except what someone else has worked out as their "formula". Writing well is not success-based, and no book can be a 12-step programme. READ.

two thirds of this book is really useful
I bought this book quite a while ago and still dip into it now and again for inspiration. Different writers give their advice, and i have earmarked those chapters written by the writers i found the most inspiring/helpful. There are two or three 'advisers' whose advice is a little superior and somewhat irritating, but this is made up for by those whose advice i have gleaned plenty from. I have recommended this book to several writing friends, and was certainly glad to discover it myself. You WILL find this book useful and an ispiration when you are stuck for where to go next in your story. If you read this book with 'your story' in mind, you will end up writing down copious notes for ideas...my copy of this book is full of margin notes!! Certainly worth the money.