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Book

Playing with words : an introduction to creative writing craft

Call Number

  • 808.02 W7261 (CEN)

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Publication Information

London : Palgrave, 2016.

Physical Description

viii, 191 pages ; 23 cm

Summary

Drawing on years of experience of writing, teaching and publishing, this book offers essential tools for anyone interested in honing their craft. With a variety of exercises and freewriting prompts to help you try new styles and approaches, it is suitable for aspiring poets, non-fiction writers, novelists and all lovers of words.

Notes

"Macmillan education."

Contents

  • Machine generated contents note: 1.Playing with Words: Flaubert's `Lemot juste'
  • Word-association Wonders
  • Collecting Words
  • Words to Sentences
  • Playing with Words
  • No Ideas but in Things
  • Le Mot Juste
  • Word Order
  • English Words: Past and Future
  • 2.Stunning Sentences and Powerful Paragraphs
  • and the role of the Grammar Police
  • Heavy Sentence Construction
  • Rule: Don't Use Run-ons
  • Short Sentences
  • Spontaneous Prose
  • Poetry
  • The Souls of Sentences
  • Powerful Paragraph Country
  • 3.Sound and Rhythm in Voice
  • Accents, Syllables and Stress
  • Repetition and Refrains
  • Rhythm: The Writer's Beat
  • The Voice of the Villanelle
  • Punctuating Prose and the Creation of Voice
  • 4.Angling for a View
  • Who's Telling?
  • It's My Story and I'm Telling It: First-person Perspective
  • I'm Telling, but Don't Believe Everything I Say: The Unreliable First Person
  • He Stepped onto the Train: An Objective Third-person Account
  • Note continued: She Wished He Would Stop Staring: Close Third-person Point of View
  • You're Happy and You Know it: The Ubiquitous Second Person
  • Unique Angles in Space: Moving Narrators into Adjacent Territories
  • Being the All-knowing, All-seeing Omniscient Creator (Who is Everywhere at All Times)
  • Narrators Who Aren't There and Epistolary Texts
  • Let Me Tell You Something: The Intrusive Narrator
  • A Myriad of Impressions: First-person Stream of Consciousness
  • Past or Present Tense
  • 5.Really Bad Writing: Melodrama, Sentimentality, Overwriting and Lazy Writing
  • Melodramatically Sentimental Overwriting
  • Staggeringly Bad Writing
  • Writer's Elbow
  • Indulgent Overwriting
  • Lazy Writing
  • Lazy Writing Protection
  • Cliches
  • Popular Writing
  • Other Deadeners and Killjoys of Writing Pleasure
  • Conclusion: There's a Troll in My Bathroom
  • 6.Silences and the Spaces Between
  • Minimalism, Icebergs and Truth
  • Unleashing the Editor
  • Note continued: Minimalist Grammar and Some Breaking of Rules (Again)
  • Litotes
  • Dispassion
  • The Art of Omission and Stitching round Black Holes
  • From Black Holes to White Spaces
  • Kill Your Darlings
  • Less and Less is More and More
  • About the Fine Art of Elimination
  • Maximalism
  • 7.Painting the Picture: Images that Light up the Sensory Cortex
  • From the Analogous to the Allegorical: Expanding the Figurative
  • Symbols, Dreams and the Power of the Single Image
  • Deconstructing Metonymy and Synecdoche
  • Hysterical Hyperbole
  • Cliches: The Classic Route to Ruining Good Writing
  • The Sensations of Our Senses
  • More Than Believable Backdrops: Establishing a Worthy Setting
  • The Magic of Movies
  • Exterior Landscape as Mirror of the Interior
  • 8.Those Who Speak: Avatars, Characters, Selves
  • Being Many Characters
  • Revealing Character through Dialogue-Driven Narrative
  • Note continued: The Mechanics of Dialogue: Avoiding Some Classic Deadeners and When It's Time to Be the Punctuation Police
  • Being a Dialogue Diva on Punctuation and Speech Tags
  • Too Much Verisimilitude in Dialogue
  • Contractions
  • Misspellings
  • Bad Grammar
  • Giving Characters Life
  • What He Thinks, What She Believes: The Inner Lives of Characters
  • Taking Action
  • Direct Exposition Description
  • What's in a Name?
  • Habits, Tics, Idiosyncrasies
  • How Others See Them
  • Character through Juxtaposition and Relationships
  • The Evolution of Character: Changes over Time
  • 9.Building Narratives: Movement through Time and Place
  • Why We Need Conflict
  • Intuitive Plotting
  • Practice-led Research
  • The Two Subjects
  • Pyramid Schemes: Formulaic Plotting
  • Hero with a Thousand Faces
  • Sucking Readers into the Vortex
  • Beginnings and Endings
  • Famous Last Words
  • Moving through Time and Space
  • Creating Suspense
  • In Medias Res
  • Flashback
  • Note continued: Foreshadowing
  • Cliffhangers
  • Themes and Hidden Narrative Movements
  • Creating Theme
  • Romance, Thrillers, True Crime and Other Genre Fiction
  • 10.Innovations
  • The Postmodern Mind
  • Palimpsest
  • Bowerbirding, Bricolage and Plagiarism
  • Polyphonic Voice
  • The Composite Novel
  • Borrowings: Ergodic Texts
  • Antinomacy: Reverse Chronology
  • Ecriture Feminine: Writing the Body
  • Magic Realism
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Historiographic Metafiction
  • Conclusion: Pushing the Boundaries.

Subjects

Added Authors

Shelley Davidow