Discusses the craft of writing, explains how to make effective use of one's time, and gives advice concerning writer's block, revision, inspiration, and manuscript submission

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

In the fourth annual Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, Monique LaRue offers a rare glimpse of one writer's experience of "between time" — how fiction writers spend their time between books. It is in this critical period that she works with, generates, abandons, and embraces ideas for new books. Literary creation is an act driven by inspiration, or, as LaRue explains it, by the moment of kairos, when the form of the work in progress reveals itself in an instant, intuitively. To get there, LaRue navigates social time in the immediacy of the present and in the distance of the past, both experienced and chronicled. Both perspectives help her build towards a new nexus of creative output. Her account of finding where her voice will take her next is simultaneously intellectual and personal as she traces her debt to her experience as a mother, the oral tradition, her training as a philosopher, and her evolving feminism.

Getting a book successfully published is as much about talent and creative drive as it is a matter of determination and business practice. Luckily for would-be authors, this book delivers the how-to on both the creativity and the business. Lecturer and writing retreat leader Tom Bird introduces authors to their Divine Author Within, and guides them through the process of listening to this inner muse. They will learn how to tap into their "creative connected mind" and relax their "logical critical mind" so they will be able to write the book they've always wanted to--in just two drafts! Once the book is complete, writers learn how to sell their book. Bird instructs his readers how to successfully navigate the publishing world so that they can make the right choices for their work.

"John Berger is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art through Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants and the oppressed around the world. He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017. In A Writer of Our Time, Joshua Sperling places Berger's life and work within the historical narrative of postwar Britain and beyond. The book explores questions that vexed a generation: the purpose of art, the nature of creative freedom, the meaning of commitment. Drawing on extensive interviews, close readings and a wealth of archival sources only recently made available, the book brings the many different faces of John Berger together and shows him as one of the most vital, and brilliant, thinkers and storytellers of our time"--

Profiles one hundred of the most influential writers throughout history, including Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, and J.K. Rowling.

You can create believable science fiction and fantasy worlds Speculative fiction is an umbrella genre enveloping the ever-expanding genres of science fiction and fantasy, and best-selling science fiction and fantasy authors Crawford Kilian and Silvia Moreno-Garcia come together in this book to show writers how to craft believable worlds and plausible characters, and ultimately, how to craft good stories. Their hands-on, practical, put-the-book-down-and-start-writing advice speaks to new and emerging authors of science fiction and fantasy. They offer more than pep talks and success stories; they explain genres and how to bend and blend them, and give concrete suggestions on how to overcome the inevitable problems writers face, such as self editing, writing plausible characters, and building a plot without writing formula fiction. With a combined nearly 50 years of experience, Kilian and Moreno-Garcia save writers time, energy, and grief by showing them how to master the craft of storytelling and how to market their stories as successfully as possible. Their invaluable advice persuades readers to go beyond their, and others’, expectations of market and genre, pushing them to be better writers, and to add their own unique storytelling voices into the growing speculative fiction arena.

From screenwriter and author J. Michael Straczynski, Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer offers expert insider advice to help fellow writers establish lasting careers as storytellers.

Essays first published in the Times Literary supplement under the heading "Limits of control."

From paragraph to essay, no text builds better writing with such an active and collaborative approach. A Writer's Workshop helps hone writing through the detailed instruction - explanation, examples, student models, and activities - that students need.