Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers Book

Now Write! Editor's Note
Get Writing!
Jayne Anne Phillips
Wedding Pictures
Robert Olen Butler
Through the Senses
Alison Lurie
My Pet
Alice Mattison
Two People Come Out of a Building and Into a Story
Alexander Chee
The Seed
Diana Abu-Jaber
Truthful Dare
Jill McCorkle
The Photograph
Rick Hillis
The Prefab Story Exercise
Maria Flook
The Upside-Down Bird: Hybridizing Memory, Place, and Invention
Paul Lisicky
A Map to Anywhere
Chuck Wachtel
Starting with the News
Debra Spark
Wedding Cake Assignment
Katherine A. Vaz
A Tabula Rasa Experiment
Karen Brennan
Collage
Dan Wakefield
The Five Senses
Crystal Wilkinson
Birth of a Story in an Hour or Less
Laurie Foos
Surrealism Exercise, or Thinking Outside the Box
Leslie Schwartz
Overcoming Dry Spells
Virgil Suárez
Field Trip
David Michael Kaplan
Smushing Seed Ideas Together
Kathleen Spivack
The Writing Exercise: A Recipe
Point of View
Nina de Gramont
Story to Tell
Maureen McCoy
First-Person Point of View: Imagining and Inhabiting Character
Clyde Edgerton
You-Me-I-You in the Cafeteria
Martha Cooley
Getting Characters' Ages Right
Paula Morris
What Are They Thinking? A Point-of-View Exercise Daphne Kalotay
Third-Person Narration and "Psychic Distance"
Eileen Pollack
Look Backward, Angel
Laura Kasischke
Let the Dead Speak: An Exercise in First-Person Narration
Character Development
Kay Sloan
Empathy and the Creation of Character
Michelle Herman
What's Under the Surface?
Lauren Grodstein
The Interview
Elizabeth Graver
"Once Upon a Time": Playing with Time in Fiction
Robert Anthony Siegel
Why I Stole It
Chris Abani
Language Portrait
Rachel Basch
Paw Through Their Pockets, Rifle Through Their Drawers
Maxine Chernoff
Mr. Samsa, Meet Bartleby
Michelle Brooks
Rattlesnake in the Drawer
K. L. Cook
A Family Theme, a Family Secret
Michael Datcher
Characters in Conflict
Edie Meidav
The Voyager: Write What You Don't Know
Joan Silber
Getting Dramatic
Mary Yukari Waters
Developing Your Characters
Lise Haines
The Way They Do the Things They Do
Cai Emmons
Braiding time
Dialogue
Steven Schwartz
Snoop 'Da Dialogue
Sands Hall
Dialogue Without Words
Lon Otto
Hearing Voices
Thomas Fox Averill
Dialogue Exercise: The Non-Apology
Douglas Unger
Level of Dialogue
Plot and Pacing
Dan Chaon
Fictional Building Blocks
Renée Manfredi
Keep the Engine Running
Fred Leebron
The Riff
Brent Spencer
Storyboard Your Story
Sean Murphy and Tania Casselle
Sticking to the Structure
Kirby Gann
What Am I Writing About? Clarifying Story Ideas Through Summary
Douglas Bauer
The Richness of Resonance
Setting and Description
Margot Livesey
Setting in Fiction
Jim Heynen
The Character of Setting
Joan Leegant
Animating the Inanimate
Venise Berry
Learning to Layer
Patricia Powell
A Sense of Place
John Smolens
Be the Tree
Geoffrey Becker
A Very, Very Long Sentence
Karen E. Bender
Most Memorable Food: Using Sensory Detail
Bret Anthony Johnston
Like Water for Words: A Simile Exercise
Craft
Susan Vreeland
Finding a Larger Truth by Turning Autobiography into Fiction
Sheila Kohler
Secrets of the Great Scene
Tony Ardizzone
Hemingway's Caroms: Descriptive Showing and Telling
Robert Boswell
How to Own a Story
Elizabeth Searle
Object Lessons
Rosellen Brown
The Goldilocks Method
Sandra Scofield
Big Scenes
Nancy Reisman
Moving Through Time: A Four-Paragraph Short Short
Joy Passanante
Using the Retrospective Lens
Amy Bloom
Water Buddies
Victoria Redel
Listening to Sound to Find Sense
Lynne Barrett
Entrances: Building Bigger Scenes
Steve Almond
The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register
Christopher Busa
Meaning Making Via Metaphor
Christopher Castellani
Soundtracking Your Story
Robert Cohen
Negative Capability
Revision
Porter Shreve
Seven Drafts in Seven Days
Ann Harleman
More Is More: An Exercise in Revising Your Story
Brian Kiteey
Potholes
Jonis Agee
The Dark Matter: Twenty Issues in Novel Revision Author Websites Acknowledgments Credits About the Editor