Winding Roads

Written by an award-winning author and Fulbright Scholar, Winding Roads:  Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction, a new first edition, offers exciting and challenging exercises to help focus your creative nonfiction writing.  The numerous exercises set simple tasks, enabling you to practice your technique and develop your existing skills.  The author believes that the greatest question you will face as a writer is how you cast or shape your piece.  Thus, the process of beginning with small pieces that allow you to progress to larger endeavors makes writing easier to manage and helps you learn to isolate each element of your piece.  Active lessons with prompts will have you writing day after day.
 
Other titles written by Diane Thiel include Crossroads:  Creative Writing in Four Genres and Open Roads:  Exercises in Writing Poetry.  You may purchase copies by going to http://www.mypearsonstore.com. 
 
WHAT YOU'LL FIND IN THIS EDITION

• An extensive anthology of essays serves as models for your own writing.
• Text includes a very strong section on revision, helping you to consider alternative ways of shaping your essay.
• Numerous exercises address each element of writing creative nonfiction separately, helping you to understand all the elements included in creating an effective piece of writing.
• Various approaches to writing creative nonfiction are clearly examined, followed by extensive practice of each specific technique.

 
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List of contents

Table of Contents
Preface to the Instructor
Introduction
 
I.  Beginning/Points of Inspiration
                                                                                               
                Keeping a Journal
                Family Stories:  History as Heartbeat
                Memory and Imagination
                Telling Lies to tell the Truth
                Making the Old Story New
                A Picture Brings Forth a Thousand Words
                Object Lessons
               
II.  Exercises for Developing Craft and Technique
 
Voice and Style
                Finding Your True Subjects
                A Question of Style
                Conditional Voice
                Breaking the Rules
 
Perspective and Point of View
                Choosing Points of View         
                Innocent Perspective
                Using Biography
               
Detail, Image, and Symbol
                Detailing a Narrative
                Turning Abstractions into Images and Action
                Using all of Your Senses
                Writing from Art
                Symbols, not Cymbals
 
Figurative Language
 
Diction
                Origins of Words
                Foreign Flavor
                Simplify
                Tell-Tale Dialect
                                                               
Setting 
                Setting with Personality
                Setting from Family History
                Setting Your Hometown
               
Creating Tension
                Foundations of Tension
                A Spell of Trouble: Conflict and Tension
                Reversing the Action
                Trading Characters, Settings, Conflicts
                Reverberating Closure
 
Rhythm
                Finding Your Rhythm
                Song and Story
                Listening to Nature
 
Character and Dialogue
                Populating a Piece
                Inside a Character's Mind
                Compelling Characters
                Dialogue Dropping from the Eaves         
 
III.  Exercises for Exploring Revision, Sub-genres and Frequent Concerns of Creative Nonfiction
 
Revision 
                Re-reading, Re-imagining, Re-shaping
                What's in a Name: Finding a Title
                Revision: Beyond the Frame
                Revision: Re-imagining Character and Conflict
                Creating Scenes:  A Revision Narrative
                Workshop: Thirteen Ways of Looking for Revision
               
Exploring the Sub-genres of Creative Nonfiction
                               

                From Memory to Memoir
                Biographical Sketch: Researching a Life
                Personal Opinion Essay: Taking a Stand
                Living Sources: Gathering and Using Information
                Reflective Writing:  Reflecting on the World
                Writing About Place
                A Piece of History
               
Exploring Frequent Concerns of Creative Nonfiction
 
                Finding the Emotional Truth
                Writing Between the Lines:  Subtext
                Time-lines and the Larger Context
                The Passage of Time
                Mapping Your Memory
                Vignettes
                Writing Inside the Story: Meta-writing
 
 
IV.  A Collection of Creative Nonfiction
 
            Diane Ackerman, “The Truth about Truffles”
            Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me”
            Rudolfo Anaya, “Why I Love Tourists: Confessions of a Dharma Bum”
            Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods”
            Philip Brady, “Myth and Uncertainty” from To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigration and the Afterlife
            Bruce Chatwin, from In Patagonia
            Wayson Choy, from Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood
            Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Silent Dancing”
            Fred D'Aguiar, “A Son in Shadow”
            Edwidge Danticat, “Westbury Court”
            Rhina Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingue”
            Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Splendor and Squalor” from Among the White Moon Faces:  An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
            Dana Gioia, “Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood”
            Joy Harjo, “The Flying Man”
            Jamaica Kincaid, “Biography of a Dress”
            Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative”
            Naomi Shihab Nye, “Three Pokes of a Thistle”
            Hilda Raz, “Looking at Aaron” from What Becomes You
            Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination”
            Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”
            Diane Thiel, “Crossing the Border” from The White Horse: A Colombian Journey
            Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
            Alice Walker, “Am I Blue”
            Anthony Walton, fromMississippi
            Terry Tempest Williams, “Peregrine Falcon,” from Refuge
 
 
V.  Writers About the Art of Creative Nonfiction
 
                Margaret Atwood, “Nine Beginnings”
                Lee Gutkind, “The Creative Nonfiction Police”
                Tracy Kidder, “Making the Truth Believable”
                Brett Lott, “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction”
                Gregory Martin, “Other People's Memories”
                John McNally, “Humor Incarnate”
                Sue Miller, “From a Lecture on Revision”

About the author

Diane Thiel is the author of six books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2000),

Writing Your Rhythm

(2001), The White Horse: A Colombian Journey (2004), Resistance Fantasies (2004), Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres (Longman, 2005) and Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry (Longman, 2005). Her work appears in major journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review,The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, among numerous others, and is reprinted in more than 30 major anthologies, including Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2004) and Contemporary American Poetry (Longman, 2005). Thiel received her BA and MFA from Brown University and has traveled and lived in various countries in Europe and South America. She has been a professor of creative writing for more than 15 years. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a recent Fulbright Scholar, she is on the creative writing faculty at the University of New Mexico.
 

Summary

Winding Roads:  Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction offers exciting and challenging exercises with accompanying models which help focus student writing and allow instructors to address specific elements of writing creative nonfiction. The numerous exercises set simple tasks, enabling students to practice their technique and develop existing skills.  The process of beginning with small pieces that allow writers to progress to larger endeavors makes writing easier to manage and helps them learn to isolate each element of the piece. 

Product details

• Authors: Diane Thiel
• Publisher: Pearson Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2008
• EAN: 9780321429896
• ISBN: 978-0-321-42989-6
• No. of pages: 320
• Weight: 410 g
• Series: Longman; Longman
• Subject: Guides > Law, job, finance > Training, job, career