Product Description

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 Su‡rez, Margot Livesey, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56228 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781585425228
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Sherry Ellis's author interviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Writer's Chronicle, Glimmer Train, and Agni, as well as other literary and arts magazines. A personal writing coach, she teaches writing in Concord, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

A How-to guide for writers
If you've ever struggled with different aspects of the writing craft, wondered how published authors have mstered the craft, been interested in going to writing workshops but lack the time or resources to attend, Ms. Ellis has made available a plethora of various writing exercises from published wirters that she has come to know through her own expereince at workshops and other contacts. Whether you are just strting to develop your writing voice or have been working at it for awhile this book will help you polish your skills, add new skills, provoke idease and stir the creative pot. A great teaching and learning book that guides you on the writing journey.

Inconsistent, but not bad.
Sherry Ellis (ed.), Now Write!: Fiction Exercises from Today's Best Teachers and Writers (Tarcher, 2006)

Exactly what it says it is: a compendium of writing exercises from various folks. Ellis herself is entirely transparent aside from a brief introduction; from there, it's the writers and nothing but.

Needless to say, in a book like this, especially with so many different contributors (there are eighty-two different sections), you're bound to have some inconsistency. As well, it sometimes seems as if there's just too much of a good thing; we go right from one exercise into the next, with only the barest separation into chapters designed to highlight different emphases in the exercises. I think most people will find a handful, or maybe a dozen, exercises they like and continually come back to those, rather than utilizing everything in the book. ***

Great Resource for Beginners and Advanced Writing Students
Now Write! is an amazing compilation of exercises for the writer just getting started, or the advanced writing student who needs help in a slump or with a specific problem of craft. Organized into sections that allow you to focus on problem areas, Ms. Ellis's book brings together exercises by many of the best writers of our era (e.g. Edgerton, Abani, Livesey, Vreeland, and others). Kaplan's exercise on "smushing seed ideas together" in Now Write! has profoundly changed the way I think about writing and the quality of the material that I generate.