Craft

Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.

Written by best-selling author Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing—an introduction to creative writing—covers all four creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama. Imaginative Writing discusses elements of craft common to all creative writing before delving into the individual genres. Each of the first five chapters investigates a specific element of craft–Image, Voice, Character, Setting, and Story–from a perspective that crosses all genres. Chapter 6 explores development and revision and serves as a bridge between the craft chapters and genre chapters. The last four chapters examine individual Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. This unique organization allows students to experiment with creative techniques shared by all genres before deciding which form best suits their imagination. Unique "Try-This" exercises help students develop writing skills, while new “Working Toward a Draft” exercises encourage students to think ahead about the direction and possibilities of their work

Organized by the elements of fiction and comprised primarily of writing exercises, this text helps students hone and refine their craft with a practical, hands-on approach to writing fiction.

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”— Los Angeles Times From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry. With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

For more than twenty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering on writers with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she brings together Zen meditation and writing in a new way. Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice—"it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind." This edition includes a new preface and an interview with the author.