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About Writing Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

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ISBN-10: 0819567167

ISBN-13: 9780819567161

Edition: 2005

Authors: Samuel R. Delany

List price: $29.95
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Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an…    
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Book details

List price: $29.95
Copyright year: 2005
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication date: 1/4/2006
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 432
Size: 5.05" wide x 7.99" long x 1.19" tall
Weight: 1.034
Language: English

Samuel R. Delany is a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includes Dhalgren (1975), Babel-17 (1966), The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007), and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). In addition to receiving the William Whitehead Memorial Award and the Kessler Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report in 1988 as one of the fifty most influential people of the past hundred years to change our conception of queerness. After more than thirty years of teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and later at Temple University, where he served as Director of the Graduate…    

Preface and Acknowledgments
An Introduction: Emblems of Talent
Seven Essays
Teaching / Writing
Thickening the Plot
Characters
On Pure Story Telling
Of Doubts and Dreams
After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate
Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on"The Beach Fire"
Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student
Four Letters
Letter to P-
Letter to Q-
Letter to R-
Letter to S-
Five Interviews
A Para*doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions
An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today
A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview
A Black Clock Interview
A Para*doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon
Appendix: Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips
Name, Date, Place
Read Widely
Grammar and Parts of Speech
Sentences
Punctuating Dialogue
A Final Note on Dialogue
Apostrophes
Dramatic Structure
Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence
Point of View
First Person
Trust Your Image
Write What You Know