How to Write Fiction

This concise yet comprehensive study explores innovative practice in the novel and, from the perspective of creative writing, the astonishing resilience of the novel form. It offers a practical guide to the many possibilities available to the writer of the novel, with each chapter offering exercises to encourage innovation and to expand the creative writer's narrative skills.

Offer tips on characters, dialogue, setting, style, themes, plot, exposition, motivation, point of view and the publishing process.

(Summary via Goodreads)

Summary: Explains the basic steps to effective fiction writing. From an award-winning author, sound, practical advice is included on the most significant elements of fiction, such as plot, character development, and voice, and strategies are provided for the effective use of tense and the dialogue. All forms of fiction are explored, including novels, novellas, short stories, and crime fiction. In addition, the writing concepts introduced are illustrated with examples from a wide variety of known writers, presenting a candid picture of the pleasure and pitfalls from a wide range of fiction-writing experiences.

Relying on engaging selections, a strong emphasis on the writing process, and a visually appealing design, Exploring Fiction puts forth a guiding philosophy that a reader's personal response to fiction forms the foundation of his or her literary experience. This book presents a comprehensive coverage of both reading and writing of fiction. Writing assignments and prompts stimulate critical thinking about works of literature. "Two Readers, Two Choices" feature illustrates diversity of opinion and the various ways in which fiction can be read. This alphabetically arranged anthology covers a broad selection of classic and contemporary fiction. Additional features include a case study on culture and research, author photos, a glossary of literary terms, an overview of literary criticism and advice on research and documentation. For anyone interested in fiction and literature.

(Summary via Goodreads)

In this engaging and accessible guide, Eugen Bacon explores writing speculative fiction as a creative practice, drawing from her own work, and the work of other writers and theorists, to interrogate its various subgenres. Through analysis of writers such as Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, this book scrutinises the characteristics of speculative fiction, considers the potential of writing cross genre and covers the challenges of targeting young adults. It connects critical and cultural theories to the practice of creative writing, examining how they might apply to the process of writing speculative fiction. Both practical and critical in its evaluative gaze, it also looks at e-publishing as a promising publishing medium for speculative fiction.

This is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of creative writing, looking to develop a critical awareness of, and practical skills for, the writing of speculative fiction. It is also a valuable resource for creators, commentators and consumers of contemporary speculative fiction. Chapter 8, 'Horror and the Paranormal' was shortlisted for the Australasian Horror Writers Association (AHWA)'s 2019 Australian Shadows Awards.

(Summary via Goodreads)

Once Upon a Time, it was NOW...While a historian stands firmly planted in the present and looks back into the past, a historical novelist has a more immediate task: to set readers in the midst of bygone events and lead them forward, allowing them to live and" feel" the wonderment, fear, hope, triumph, and pain as if they were there.

(Summary via Goodreads)

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes. Funny, frank, and rigorous, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs

The Elements of Style is an American English writing style guide. It is one of the most influential and best-known prescriptive treatments of English grammar and usage in the United States. It originally detailed eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, and 'a few matters of form' as well as a list of commonly misused words and expressions. Updated editions of the paperback book are often required reading for American high school and college composition classes.

Challenges the ableism of fairy tales and offers new ways to celebrate the magic of all bodies. In fairy tales, happy endings are the norm - as long as you're beautiful and walk on two legs. After all, the ogre never gets the princess. And since fairy tales are the foundational myths of our culture, how can a girl with a disability ever think she'll have a happy ending? By examining the ways that fairy tales have shaped our expectations of disability, Disfigured will point the way toward a new world where disability is no longer a punishment or impediment but operates, instead, as a way of centering a protagonist and helping them to cement their own place in a story, and from there, the world. Through the book, Leduc ruminates on the connections we make between fairy tale archetypes - the beautiful princess, the glass slipper, the maiden with long hair lost in the tower - and tries to make sense of them through a twenty-first-century disablist lens. From examinations of disability in tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen through to modern interpretations ranging from Disney to Angela Carter, and the fight for disabled representation in today's media, Leduc connects the fight for disability justice to the growth of modern, magical stories, and argues for increased awareness and acceptance of that which is other - helping us to see and celebrate the magic inherent in different bodies.

This book discusses the evolution of horror fiction in the 20th century in a critical but balanced fashion. It explores both the best-known authors of horror literature and a large number of lesser-known or forgotten authors whose work would merit searching out by modern readers.

Science fiction is a non-realist genre that foregrounds a sense of material plausibility, insisting that despite seeming outlandish, it is consonant with history and the laws of nature. By turns subtle and bombastic, sci-fi revels in discovery and revelation, whether through human ingenuity or world-altering paradigm shifts. The same impulse informs both the idealism of Star Trek and the existential terror of Frankenstein.

Each chapter of this book examines a specific trope or theme through a different critical lens - including eco-criticism, feminism and historicism - while also providing a historical overview of the genre, from its disputed origins to the pulp era, the New Wave, and the exponential growth of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms. Revered masters such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler and Iain M. Banks are considered alongside newer talents, including Rebecca Roanhorse and N. K. Jemisin. Other chapters provide overviews of different media, from television (Doctor Who, Westworld) to comics/manga (2000AD), video games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and theatre (Alistair McDowall's X).

Sci-Fi: A Companion not only provides an accessible introduction to sci-fi for general readers and researchers alike, but also illuminates new approaches to a familiar genre.

How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of readingNarrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their "well-formedness" within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains. In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative. Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of such texts as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it.Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality and causality--and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. For all readers, The Secret Life of Stories will fundamentally change the way we think about the way we read.