Writing True

Author: Sondra Perl
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781133307433
Category : Creative nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book shows writers of all ages how to find and develop nonfiction topics that matter to them�in ways that make readers care too. It emphasizes writing for discovery, not just writing what one knows. It emphasizes a strong authorial presence (voice) and a convincing point of view. Most important, it not only tells but also shows how writing true involves the poet's attention to language, the fiction writer's power of storytellling, the journalist's pursuit of fact, and the scholar's reliance on research. The first part of the book offers ten practical chapters from getting started to turning first ideas into finished work. Topics include: The Power of the Notebook, Ten Ways to a Draft, Taking Shape, Finding Voice, Twenty Ways to Talk About Writing, The Craft of Revision, The Role of Research, The Ethics of Creative Nonfiction, Workshopping a Draft, and Exploring New Media. The second part of the book is an anthology of the best nonfiction writing for aspiring writers to read and study in order to write with creativity, integrity, and authenticity. Organized by form, they include Memoir, Personal Essay, Portrait, Essay of Place, Narrative Journalism, and Short Shorts. Selections represent a variety of experience from classic masters (E.B.White and George Orwell) to major contemporary writers (such as Alice Walker, Stephen Dunn, and Scott Russell Sanders) to up and coming writers (such as E.J. Levy and Amy Butcher). The anthology also includes "Stories of Craft," with five prominent writers, including Patricia Hampl and Sue Miller, describing the challenges and rewards of writing engaging nonfiction.

Telling True Stories

Author: Mark Kramer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440628947
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Interested in journalism and creative writing and want to write a book? Read inspiring stories and practical advice from America’s most respected journalists. The country’s most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors gather each year at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Telling True Stories presents their best advice—covering everything from finding a good topic, to structuring narrative stories, to writing and selling your first book. More than fifty well-known writers offer their most powerful tips, including: • Tom Wolfe on the emotional core of the story • Gay Talese on writing about private lives • Malcolm Gladwell on the limits of profiles • Nora Ephron on narrative writing and screenwriters • Alma Guillermoprieto on telling the story and telling the truth • Dozens of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists from the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and more . . . The essays contain important counsel for new and career journalists, as well as for freelance writers, radio producers, and memoirists. Packed with refreshingly candid and insightful recommendations, Telling True Stories will show anyone fascinated by the art of writing nonfiction how to bring people, scenes, and ideas to life on the page.

Tell Me True

Author: Patricia Hampl
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
ISBN: 0873517032
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Fourteen accomplished writers investigate the tantalizing gray area where memory and history intersect.

Writing True Stories

Author: Patti Miller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040029914
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Patti Miller's best-selling Writing True Stories is the essential book for anyone who has ever wanted to write a memoir or explore the wider territory of creative nonfiction. It provides practical guidance and inspiration on a vast array of writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice, build a vivid world on the page, create structure, use research, and face the difficulties of truth-telling. It first develops a wide range of writing skills for beginners, and then challenges more experienced writers to extend their knowledge and practice of the genre into literary nonfiction, true crime, biography, the personal essay, the diary, and travel writing. It offers inspiration from other nonfiction writers, such as Joan Didion, Helen Garner, Robert Dessaix, and Zadie Smith. Whether you want to write your own memoir, investigate a wide-ranging political issue, explore an idea, or bring to life an intriguing history, this book will be your guide. Writing True Stories is practical and easy to use as well as an encouraging and insightful companion on the writing journey. Written in a warm, clear, and engaging style, it will get you started on the story you want to write – and keep you going until you get there.

Clear and Simple as the Truth

Author: Francis-Noël Thomas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887356
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart. At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards. In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing. The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn't. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichirō Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Ghost

Author: Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481450166
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Aspiring to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school's track team, gifted runner Ghost finds his goal challenged by a tragic past with a violent father.

Death in the Air

Author: Kate Winkler Dawson
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316506850
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.

Writing Bestselling True Crime and Suspense

Author: Tom Byrnes
Publisher: Prima Lifestyles
ISBN: 9780761510260
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
True crime and suspense stories make a killing at the box office, on bestseller lists, and on TV. Both new and experienced writers have found that they can master the special skills required to make crime pay -- in book and movie contracts. "Writing Bestselling True Crime and Suspense shows how you, too, can: - Find and develop compelling true crime stories from everyday sources - Dig out the facts and put them on paper - Fashion your story for books, TV, or movies - Market your story for maximum profit - And much moreAs a special bonus, author Tom Byrnes has included in-depth interviews with true crime movers and shakers including writers, publishers, and Hollywood producers. Writing Bestselling True Crime and Suspense will show you how to craft gripping accounts of the dark deeds that dominate the news and sell them to publishers and beyond. About the Author Tom Byrnes is the author of the national bestseller "Madame Foreman: A Rush to Judgment, about the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial. He is also an award-winning editor and a journalist whose work has appeared in national newspapers and magazines.

True Love

Author: Sarah Gerard
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062937421
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
A Glamour Best Book of 2020 • A Bustle Best Books of 2020 • Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award • An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer • A Refinery29 25 Book You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection • A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.

Writing 'true Stories'

Author: Arietta Papaconstantinou
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503527864
Category : Christianity and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The papers in this volume examine the interaction between history and hagiography in the late antique and medieval Middle East, exploring the various ways in which the two genres were used and combined to analyse, interpret, and re-create the past. The contributors focus on the circulation of motifs between the two forms of writing and the modifications and adaptations of the initial story that such reuse entailed. Beyond this purely literary question, the retold stories are shown to have been at the centre of a number of cultural, political, and religious strategies, as they were appropriated by different groups, not least by the nascent Muslim community. Writing 'True Stories' also foregrounds the importance of some Christian hagiographical motifs in Muslim historiography, where they were creatively adapted and subverted to define early Islamic ideals of piety and charisma.