<> <strong>Contents</strong> <p>Preface <br></p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>PART ONE</p> <p>Beginnings</p> <p> 1. First Sentences: Beginning in the Middle</p> <p> 2. Second Sentences as Different Paths</p> <p> 3. Ways to Begin a Story, from Robie Macauley</p> <p> 4. Begin a Story with a “Given” First Line, from William Kittredge</p> <p> 5. Free Associating from Random Sentences, from DeWitt Henry</p> <p> 6. Person, Place, and Song, from Ron Carlson</p> <p> 7. Stirring Up a Fiction Stew</p> <p> 8. The Newspaper Muse: Ann Landers and the National Enquirer</p> <p> 9. Taking Risks <br></p> <p>PART TWO</p> <p>Characterization</p> <p> 10. Oh! . . . That Sort of Person</p> <p> 11. What Do You Know About Your Characters?</p> <p> 12. Props</p> <p> 13. What Do Your Characters Want?</p> <p> 14. Making Heroes Flawed, from Douglas Bauer</p> <p> 15. Creating a Character’s Background, Place, Setting, and Milieu, from Robie Macauley</p> <p> 16. Put Your Characters to Work</p> <p> 17. The Morning After</p> <p> 18. He/She: Switching Gender <br></p> <p>PART THREE</p> <p>Perspective, Distance, and Point of View</p> <p> 19. First Person or Third</p> <p> 20. John Gardner on Psychic Distance</p> <p> 21. Shifts in Point of View</p> <p> 22. An Early Memory, Part One: The Child as Narrator</p> <p> 23. An Early Memory, Part Two: The Reminiscent Narrator</p> <p> 24. The Unreliable Narrator</p> <p> 25. Family Stories, Family Myths</p> <p>PART FOUR</p> <p>Dialogue</p> <p> 26. Speech Flavor, or Sounding Real, from Thalia Selz</p> <p> 27. Telling Talk: When to Use Dialogue or Summarized Dialogue</p> <p> 28. Who Said That?</p> <p> 29. The Invisible Scene: Interspersing Dialogue with Action</p> <p> 30. A Verbal Dance: Not Quite a Fight</p> <p>PART FIVE</p> <p>The Interior Landscape of Your Characters</p> <p> 31. The Interior Landscape of Vision and Obsession</p> <p> 32. What Mayhem or Scene Is Happening Elsewhere?</p> <p> 33. “I Know Just What She’ll Say”</p> <p> 34. Mixed Motives and Maybes</p> <p> 35. The Need to Know: The Solace of Imagination</p> <p> 36. The Inside/Outside Story</p> <p> 37. Five Years from Now.....</p> <p> 38. Dream Work</p> <p> 39. The Power of “Seemed” and “Probably”</p> <p>PART SIX</p> <p>Plot</p> <p> 40. The Skeleton</p> <p> 41. From Situation to Plot</p> <p> 42. Peter Rabbit and Adam and Eve: The Elements of Plot, from Thomas Fox Averill</p> <p> 43. What If? How to Develop and Finish Stories</p> <p> 44. There’s a Party and You’re Invited, from Margot Livesey</p> <p> 45. So, What Happened?</p> <p> 46. Flash Forward: or Little Did I Know</p> <p> 47. Plot Potential</p> <p> 48. Back Story as Narrative Summary: Who’s Coming to Stay the Night</p> <p> 49. The End Foretold</p> <p>PART SEVEN</p> <p>The Elements of Style</p> <p> 50. A Style of Your Own, from Rod Kessler</p> <p> 51. Taboos: Weak Adverbs and Adjectives</p> <p> 52. Word Packages Are Not Gifts</p> <p> 53. Practice Writing Good, Clean Prose, from Christopher Keane</p> <p>PART EIGHT</p> <p>A Writer’s Toolbox</p> <p> 54. Handling the Problems of Time and Pace, from Robie Macauley</p> <p> 55. The Pet Story: Exposition, from Ron Carlson</p> <p> 56. Bringing Abstract Ideas to Life</p> <p> 57. Transportation: Getting There isn’t Half the Fun—It’s Boring</p> <p> 58. Naming the Diner, Naming the Diet, Naming the Dog</p> <p> 59. Transitions: Or White Space Does Not a Transition Make</p> <p> 60. How to Keep a Narrative Moving Forward</p> <p> 61. Noises Off: The Beauty of Extraneous Sound, from Laurence Davies</p> <p> 62. Separating Author, Narrator, and Character, from Frederick Reiken</p> <p> 63. Time Travel</p> <p> 64. Stairs: Setting and Place</p> <p> 65. Titles and Keys <br></p> <p>PART NINE</p> <p>Invention and a Bit of Inspiration</p> <p> 66. Illustrations, from Margot Livesey</p> <p> 67. Bully</p> <p> 68. Far away Places</p> <p> 69. Story Swap: From Jordan Dann and the Aspen Writers’ Foundation</p> <p> 70. Humor: an Intact Frog</p> <p> 71. Sunday: Discovering Emotional Triggers</p> <p> 72. Kill the Dog</p> <p> 73. Five Different Versions: And Not One Is a Lie</p> <p> 74. What You Carry</p> <p> 75. Psycho: Creating Terror</p> <p> 76. One in the Hand</p> <p> 77. Notes and Letters</p> <p> 78. The Chain Story <br></p> <p>PART TEN</p> <p>Revision: Rewriting Is Writing</p> <p> 79. Opening Up Your Story</p> <p> 80. Gifts to Yourself</p> <p> 81. Show and Tell: There’s a Reason It’s Called Storytelling, from Carol-Lynn Marrazzo</p> <p> 82. A Little Gardening, A Little Surgery</p> <p> 83. Magnifying Conflict, from David Ray</p> <p> 84. What’s at Stake? from Ken Rivard</p> <p> 85. It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over</p> <p> 86. The Double Ending: Two Points in Time</p> <p> 87. In-Class Revision <br></p> <p>PART ELEVEN</p> <p>Sudden, Flash, Micro, Nano: Writing the Short Short Story</p> <p> 88. Sudden Fiction, from James Thomas</p> <p> 89. Write a Story Using a Small Unit of Time</p> <p> 90. Solving for X, from Ron Carlson</p> <p> 91. The Journey of the Long Sentence</p> <p> 92. He said/She said: But About What!</p> <p> 93. Rules of the Game</p> <p> 94. Ten to One, from Hester Kaplan</p> <p> 95. Make a List</p> <p> 96. Questions. Some Answers</p> <p> 97. How to . . . . . .</p> <p> 98. Nanofictions</p> <p>PART TWELVE</p> <p>Learning from the Greats</p> <p> 99. Finding Inspiration in Other Sources—Poetry, Nonfiction, etc.</p> <p> 100. The Sky’s the Limit: Homage to Kafka and García Márquez, from Christopher Noël</p> <p> 101. Learning from the Greats</p> <p> 102. Borrowing Characters</p> <p> 103. What Keeps You Reading?</p> <p> 104. The Literary Scene Circa 1893, 1929, 1948, or?, from George Garrett <br></p> <p>PART THIRTEEN</p> <p>Notebooks, Journals, and Memory</p> <p> 105. Who Are You? Somebody!</p> <p> 106. People From the Past: Characters of the Future</p> <p> 107. An Image Notebook, from Melanie Rae Thon</p> <p> 108. Journal Keeping for Writers, from William Melvin Kelley</p> <p> 109. Creative Wrong Memory</p> <p> 110. Let Us Write Letters</p> <p>PART FOURTEEN</p> <p>A Collection of Short Short Stories</p> <p>LINDA BREWER 20/20 <br></p> <p>ANTONIA CLARK Excuses I Have Already Used</p> <p>BRIAN HINSHAW The Custodian</p> <p>MARIETTE LIPPO Confirmation Names</p> <p>MELISSA MCCRACKEN It Would’ve Been Hot</p> <p>JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL My Mother’s Gifts</p> <p>PAMELA PAINTER The New Year</p> <p>GRACE PALEY Wants</p> <p>BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS How Could a Mother</p> <p>ELIZABETH TALLENT No One’s a Mystery</p> <p>LUISA VALENZUELA Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye</p> <p><strong>PART FIFTEEN</strong></p> <p><strong>A Collection of Short Stories </strong></p> <p>CHARLES BAXTER Gryphon</p> <p>RON CARLSON Some of Our Work with Monsters</p> <p>RAYMOND CARVER Cathedral</p> <p>SANDRA CISNEROS Eleven</p> <p>MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM White Angel</p> <p>DAGOBERTO GILB The Pillows</p> <p>PAM HOUSTON How to Talk to a Hunter</p> <p>HESTER KAPLAN WOULD YOU KNOW IT WASN’T LOVE?</p> <p>BOBBIE ANN MASON Shiloh</p> <p>THOMAS MCNEELY Sheep</p> <p>ALICE MUNRO Five Points</p> <p>ZZ Packer Brownies</p> <p>RICHARD RUSSO The Whore’s Child</p> <p>JENNIFER SHAFF Leave of Absence</p> <p>KATE WHEELER Under the Roof <br></p> <p>Selected Bibliography <br></p> <p>About the Contributors of Exercises <br></p> <p>Credits <br></p> <p>Index</p>