Short Stories Eureka features the best of model narrative stories written by English Language and Literature specialist, Diana Tham. Through her stories, as well as works by her students, Diana shows students how to apply model structures and writing techniques to their own writing, providing them with strategies that will help to crystallise their ideas and realize their creative potential. Using these essays as a guide, students will be able to hone the necessary writing skills they need to ensure exceptional scores in any examination.
The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true. In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir--a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author's past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered. The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one's deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O'Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process. For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
A prolific and award-winning writer, Lee Martin has put pen to paper to offer his wisdom, honed during thirty years of teaching the oh-so-elusive art of writing. Telling Stories is intended for anyone interested in thinking more about the elements of storytelling in short stories, novels, and memoirs. Martin clearly delineates helpful and practical techniques for demystifying the writing process and provides tools for perfecting the art of the scene, characterization, detail, point of view, language, and revision--in short, the art of writing. His discussion of the craft in his own life draws from experiences, memories, and stories to provide a more personal perspective on the elements of writing. Martin provides encouragement by sharing what he's learned from his journey through frustrations, challenges, and successes. Most important, Telling Stories emphasizes that you are not alone on this journey and that writers must remain focused on what they love: the process of moving words on the page. By focusing on that purpose, Martin contends, the journey will always take you where you're meant to go.
Explores the key challenges in writing narrative non-fiction, and shows how some of the best in the business do it - an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to tell true stories well.
Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.
Now issued as a Routledge Education Classic Edition, Bud Goodall's Writing Qualitative Inquiry responds to the rapid growth of personal narrative as a method of inquiry among qualitative scholars by offering a concise volume of practical advice for scholars and students seeking to work in this tradition. He provides writing tips and strategies from a well-published, successful author of creative nonfiction and concrete guidance on finding appropriate outlets for your work. For readers, he offers a set of criteria to assess the quality of creative nonfiction writing. Goodall suggests paths to success within the academy--still rife with political sinkholes for the narrative ethnographer--and ways of building a career as a public scholar. Goodall's work serves as both a writing manual and career guide for those in qualitative inquiry. A new foreword by Christopher N. Poulos reflects on Bud Goodall's life and work, and the impact of this book on narrative writing.
This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory - concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them. This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a 'semiotic model of narrative, ' it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme - elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism). This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis, ' J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others). Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.
A Companion to Creative Writing comprehensively considers key aspects of the practice, profession and culture of creative writing in the contemporary world.
"Here is a worthy successor to Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making, the book that enabled me to gain the confidence to begin to find my own voice as a story teller. Children Writing Stories confirms that we all have a story to tell if we are enabled to develop enough self-belief. So much of our natural creativity is smothered during our school years. Teachers and children feel hemmed in by the strictures of a curriculum which simply does not allow room for creativity to breathe. Unlock the chains, let the light in, and this is the kind of writing that will flow, this is the kind of intellectual and emotional growing that can transform young lives." Michael Morpurgo, Children's Laureate 2003-2005 "What a splendid book! Michael Armstrong paysattention - thirty years of it - to the stories thatchildren write. We get two for one: the children'sown delightful and intriguing work - I want torush off and write some Wally (age 5) stories ofmy own - and Michael Armstrong's intenseinterpretations. " Allan Ahlberg "This is real learning at its best, teaching byexample, through painstaking scrutiny of the artof young writers. Absorbing, moving,enlightening, inspiring." Morag Styles, University of Cambridge In Children Writing Stories, Michael Armstrong reveals the creative force of children's narrative imagination and shows how this develops through childhood. He provides a new and powerful understanding of the significance of narrative for children's intellectual growth and for learning and teaching. The book explores a series of real stories written by children between the ages of five and fifteen, and traces the growth of literary consciousness from the dawn of written narrative in the kindergarten, through the early years of schooling and on into adolescence. Each chapter opens with a story or stories, which the author then goes on to examine in detail, so that the book may be seen as both a select anthology of children's stories and as a critical account of children's narrative practice. This original and provocative book will appeal to teachers, parents, students of education and readers with an interest in literacy, children's writing or narrative theory.
This book links popular British fiction from the 1790s through the 1860s to anxieties about time. The cataclysm of the French Revolution, discoveries in geology, biology, and astronomy that greatly expanded the age and size of the universe, and technological developments such as the railway and the telegraph combined to transform the experience of time and dramatize its aporetic nature--time as inarticulable contradiction.
There was a time when good writing would be defined simply by adverting to a few literary classics. That kind of strategy is less helpful these days, when so many different styles and voices are clamoring for attention. 'What Is Good Writing?' sets the terms for a contemporary debate on writing achievement by drawing on empirical research in linguistics and the other cognitive sciences that shed light on the development of fluency in language generally.
What stories can we tell of ourselves and others and why should they be of interest to others? Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research responds to these questions with examples from diverse educational and social contexts. The book brings together a collection of writing by different authors who use a narrative/life history approach to explore the experiences of a wide range of people, including teachers, nurses, young people and adults, reflecting on learning and education at significant moments in their lives. In addition, each chapter provides an account by the author of the process of constructing research narratives, and the second chapter of the book focuses specifically on ethical issues in life history and narrative research. This book: provides vivid examples of a narrative/life history approach to research uses narrative/life history to explore identity, power and social justice offers an effective model for practice. With contributions from a number of international experts, this book addresses key issues of social justice and power played out within different contexts, and also discusses the ethics of narrative research directly. The book makes a timely contribution to the growing interest in the use of narrative and life history research. With the increasing importance of continuing professional development for many working in education, health and social service contexts, the book will be of interest to both students and researchers, as it provides clear examples of how researching professionals can use narrative research to investigate a particular area of interest.