This updated edition of the classic, comprehensive guide to creative writing features new topics and writing prompts, contemporary examples, and more. A creative writer's shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. This best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft....

Presents advice on the basic elements of narrative prose, covering point of view, sentence length and complex syntax, indirect narration, grammar, punctuation, and the sound of writing.

In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative "laboratory" where theoretical questions about storytelling-and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity-are presented in story form. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, Wittenberg links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in...

A writer's reference by a "New York Times" editor shares fifty strategies for writing successful nonfiction narratives, in a lighthearted guide that draws on real-world examples and incorporates tales from his work in the newsroom.

Identifies a new genre-misdirection films-and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences. Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of "misdirection films," a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999),...

In the 1940s, American movies changed. Flashbacks began to be used in outrageous, unpredictable ways. Soundtracks flaunted voice-over commentary, and characters might pivot from a scene to address the viewer. Incidents were replayed from different characters' viewpoints, and sometimes those versions proved to be false. Films now plunged viewers into characters' memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Some films didn't have protagonists, while others...

Alle litterAere tekster har en fortAeller, som ikke er identisk med forfatteren; det blev slaet fast som en ubestridelig lov, da narratologien opstod i slutningen af 1960'erne. FortAellerfiktionen undersoger, hvordan myten om fortAelleren blev til - og giver et detaljeret billede af, hvordan den blev bade forvandlet og befAestet i Gerard Genettes skelsAettende fortAelleteori.Denne bogs kritiske nAeranalyse af Genettes Discours du recit (1972) og Nouveau...

"A pioneering study of a unique narrative form, Words about Pictures examines the special qualities of picture books--books intended to educate or tell stories to young children. Drawing from a number of aesthetic and literary sources, Perry Nodelman explores the ways in which the interplay of the verbal and visual aspects of picture books conveys more narrative information and stimulation than either medium could achieve alone. Moving from "baby"...

"Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT), reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado, Bell, and Williams, foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated...

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable narrator who will tell the story that needs to be told? Using...