Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers

A collection of personal writing exercises and commentary from some of today's best novelists, short story writers, and writing teachers, including Jill McCorkle, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Virgil Suarez, Margot Livesay, and more. What's the secret behind the successful and prolific careers of critically acclaimed novelists and short story writers Amy Bloom, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alison Lurie, and others? Divine assistance? Otherworldly talent? An unsettlingly close relationship with the Muse? While the rest of us are staring at blank sheets of paper, struggling to come up with a first sentence, these writers are busy polishing off story after story and novel after novel. Despite producing work that may seem effortless, all of them have a simple technique for fending off writer's block- the writing exercise. In Now Write!, Sherry Ellis collects the personal writing exercises of today's best writers and lays bare the secret to their success. - In "The Photograph," Jill McCorkle divulges one of her tactics for handling material that takes plots in a million different directions; - National Book Award-nominee Amy Bloom offers "Water Buddies," an exercise for writers practicing their craft in workshops; - Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and Candyfreak, provides a way to avoiding purple prose in "The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register"; - and eighty-three more of the country's top writers disclose their strategies for creating memorable prose. Complemented by brief commentary from the authors themselves, the exercises in Now Write! are practical and hands-on. By encouraging writers to shamelessly steal proven techniques that have yielded books which have won National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and Guggenheim grants, Now Write! inspires the aspiring writer to write now.

Table of Contents:
Now Write!Editor's Note Get Writing! Jayne Anne Phillips Wedding Pictures Robert Olen Butler Through the Senses Alison Lurie My Pet Alice Mattison Two People Come Out of a Building and Into a Story Alexander Chee The Seed Diana Abu-Jaber Truthful Dare Jill McCorkle The Photograph Rick Hillis The Prefab Story Exercise Maria Flook The Upside-Down Bird: Hybridizing Memory, Place, and Invention Paul Lisicky A Map to Anywhere Chuck Wachtel Starting with the News Debra Spark Wedding Cake Assignment Katherine A. Vaz A Tabula Rasa Experiment Karen Brennan Collage Dan Wakefield The Five Senses Crystal Wilkinson Birth of a Story in an Hour or Less Laurie Foos Surrealism Exercise, or Thinking Outside the Box Leslie Schwartz Overcoming Dry Spells Virgil Suárez Field Trip David Michael Kaplan Smushing Seed Ideas Together Kathleen Spivack The Writing Exercise: A Recipe Point of View Nina de Gramont Story to Tell Maureen McCoy First-Person Point of View: Imagining and Inhabiting Character Clyde Edgerton You-Me-I-You in the Cafeteria Martha Cooley Getting Characters' Ages Right Paula Morris What Are They Thinking? A Point-of-View ExerciseDaphne Kalotay Third-Person Narration and "Psychic Distance" Eileen Pollack Look Backward, Angel Laura Kasischke Let the Dead Speak: An Exercise in First-Person Narration Character Development Kay Sloan Empathy and the Creation of Character Michelle Herman What's Under the Surface? Lauren Grodstein The Interview Elizabeth Graver "Once Upon a Time": Playing with Time in Fiction Robert Anthony Siegel Why I Stole It Chris Abani Language Portrait Rachel Basch Paw Through Their Pockets, Rifle Through Their Drawers Maxine Chernoff Mr. Samsa, Meet Bartleby Michelle Brooks Rattlesnake in the Drawer K. L. Cook A Family Theme, a Family Secret Michael Datcher Characters in Conflict Edie Meidav The Voyager: Write What You Don't Know Joan Silber Getting Dramatic Mary Yukari Waters Developing Your Characters Lise Haines The Way They Do the Things They Do Cai Emmons Braiding time Dialogue Steven Schwartz Snoop 'Da Dialogue Sands Hall Dialogue Without Words Lon Otto Hearing Voices Thomas Fox Averill Dialogue Exercise: The Non-Apology Douglas Unger Level of Dialogue Plot and Pacing Dan Chaon Fictional Building Blocks Renée Manfredi Keep the Engine Running Fred Leebron The Riff Brent Spencer Storyboard Your Story Sean Murphy and Tania Casselle Sticking to the Structure Kirby Gann What Am I Writing About? Clarifying Story Ideas Through Summary Douglas Bauer The Richness of Resonance Setting and Description Margot Livesey Setting in Fiction Jim Heynen The Character of Setting Joan Leegant Animating the Inanimate Venise Berry Learning to Layer Patricia Powell A Sense of Place John Smolens Be the Tree Geoffrey Becker A Very, Very Long Sentence Karen E. Bender Most Memorable Food: Using Sensory Detail Bret Anthony Johnston Like Water for Words: A Simile Exercise Craft Susan Vreeland Finding a Larger Truth by Turning Autobiography into Fiction Sheila Kohler Secrets of the Great Scene Tony Ardizzone Hemingway's Caroms: Descriptive Showing and Telling Robert Boswell How to Own a Story Elizabeth Searle Object Lessons Rosellen Brown The Goldilocks Method Sandra Scofield Big Scenes Nancy Reisman Moving Through Time: A Four-Paragraph Short Short Joy Passanante Using the Retrospective Lens Amy Bloom Water Buddies Victoria Redel Listening to Sound to Find Sense Lynne Barrett Entrances: Building Bigger Scenes Steve Almond The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register Christopher Busa Meaning Making Via Metaphor Christopher Castellani Soundtracking Your Story Robert Cohen Negative Capability Revision Porter Shreve Seven Drafts in Seven Days Ann Harleman More Is More: An Exercise in Revising Your Story Brian Kiteey Potholes Jonis Agee The Dark Matter: Twenty Issues in Novel Revision Author Websites Acknowledgments Credits About the Editor

About the Author :
Sherry Ellis is the editor of NOW WRITE! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers and NOW WRITE! NONFICTION, as well as a personal writing coach. Her author interviews have appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Writer's Chronicle, Glimmer Train, and AGNI, as well as other literary and arts magazines. She lives in Massachusetts.