Shaping the Story is, as the subtitle says, an introduction to writing fiction. It was published by Sundown Press, an imprint of Prairie Rose Publications, in January of 2019. It is a little over 100,000 words all together, with 68,000 in the main text and 36,000 in a short anthology of out-of-copyright stories to illustrate many of the elements and principles discussed in the main text. I hope it is useful to people who want to learn on their own as well as to those who might end up taking a class or workshop with me.
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Understanding Fiction is a textbook/manual I have put together for my college classes in introduction to literature and studies in the short story. Like Writing for Real, it evolved out of materials I developed for a distance course. When I first undertook the project, I was presenting a course in short fiction and the novel, and I wrote explanatory sections for stories in an anthology I had ordered and for novels I had selected.
Continue readingWriting for Real is a textbook I have composed for my classes in college composition. It first began to take shape many years ago, when I was putting together a manual for a distance course in composition. At that time, I wrote up quite a bit of material that I used to present in lecture or discussion, and I plundered material that I had included in an earlier version of the Blue Book of Basic Writing (ostensibly for a broader audience, at the suggestion of the publisher at the time) but did not use to any appreciable extent and then took out.
Continue readingIn a separate post, I mention that I developed a collateral text, consisting entirely of supplemental exercises, to go along with the Blue Book of Basic Writing, a textbook I have developed and used for several years in my basic writing courses. This secondary text is entitled Done by Friday (reference to Robinson Crusoe explained in the Preface), and like my other textbook/course manual works, it has been published by Endeavor Books. I would like to express my appreciation for Dan at Endeavor Books, as he has worked with great patience and consideration as he has made these books available to students (and others) at very reasonable prices.
Done by Friday is available at Amazon.
The Blue Book of Basic Writing is a textbook I developed for my basic writing classes. I first started working on it in the late 1980’s, when I had become more and more dissatisfied with basic writing textbooks on the market. The more I taught basic writing, the more I developed my own materials, until I had enough to begin building my own text.
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