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A Long Game book cover
A Long Game
Notes on Writing Fiction
2025
First Published
4.32
Average Rating
205
Number of Pages

From bestselling and award-winning author and professor Elizabeth McCracken comes an irresistible look at the art of writing. Writing can feel like an endless series of decisions. How does one face the blank page? Move a character around a room? Deal with time? Undertake revision? The good and bad news is that in fiction writing, there are no definitive answers to such writers must come up with their own. Elizabeth McCracken, author of bestselling novels, National Book Award long-listed story collections, and a highly praised memoir, has been teaching for more than thirty-five years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. “Writing is a long game,” she notes. “What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or every life needs both.” As much a book about the life of a working artist as it is a guide to thinking about fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource for any writer.

Avg Rating
4.32
Number of Ratings
189
5 STARS
53%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
12%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken
Author · 11 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Elizabeth McCracken (born 1966) is an American author. She is married to the novelist Edward Carey, with whom she has two children - August George Carey Harvey and Matilda Libby Mary Harvey. An earlier child died before birth, an experience which formed the basis for McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, and holds a degree in library science from Simmons College, a women's college in Boston. McCracken currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she is an artist-in-residence at Skidmore College. She is the sister of PC World magazine editor-in-chief Harry McCracken.

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