A guide to writing includes discussions of style, humor, genre fiction, editing, promotion, and children's books

The Story Behind THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE If you've read his books THE WAR OF ART and TURNING PRO, you know that for thirty years Steven Pressfield (GATES OF FIRE, THE AFGHAN CAMPAIGN etc.) wrote spec novel after spec novel before any publisher took him seriously. How did he finally break through? Ignoring just about every rule of commercial book publishing, Pressfield's "first" novel not only became a major bestseller (over 250,000 copies sold), it was adapted into a feature film directed by Robert Redford and starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron. Where did he get the idea? What magical something did THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE have that his previous manuscripts lacked? Why did Pressfield decide to write a novel when he already had a well established screenwriting career? How does writing a publishable novel really work? Taking a page from John Steinbeck's classic JOURNAL OF A NOVEL, Steven Pressfield offers answers for these and scores of other practical writing questions in THE AUTHENTIC SWING.

Being a writer is not just about typing. It's also about surviving the roller-coaster of the creative journey. Self-doubt, fear of failure, the need for validation, perfectionism, writer's block, comparisonitis, overwhelm, and much more. This book offers a survival strategy and ways to deal with them all.

Author and former literary agent Nathan Bransford shares his secrets for creating killer plots, fleshing out your first ideas, crafting compelling characters, and staying sane in the process. Read the guide that New York Times bestselling author Ransom Riggs called "The best how-to-write-a-novel book I've read."

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

Recent graduate Ellie has debt, an unpaid internship and three flatmates who left her with the single room to match her single status. That’s ok. She doesn’t want a boyfriend anyway. She wants several. But as Ellie tests out every new dating craze she’s realising that the ultimate single lifestyle might not be that easy after all...

A penetrating and ambitious historical novel, Havoc, in Its Third Year is an ingenious, often deeply unnerving narrative of seventeenth-century England that speaks directly to the fanaticism and fears of today. The time is the early seventeenth century, as the quarrel between Royalists and Parliamentarians turns toward civil war, and that between Catholics and Protestants leads toward bloody religious tyranny; the place is a town in northern England, set in a grim landscape swept by crop failures, plague and rumors of war, in which rigid Puritans have taken over government and imposed their own rules. At the center of the novel is John Brigge, the Coroner and a Governor of the town, though not by any means as convinced a zealot as his fellow governors have become. Married and deeply in love with Elizabeth, who is pregnant with their first child, he has a guilty secret to hide in his affection for Dorcas, his wife's ward -- a secret which, in the world of religious prejudice and extremism toward which England is moving, can be lethal. Determined to obey the law, rather than prejudice and the need to make an example of an Irishwoman accused of murdering her own infant, Brigge draws upon himself the hostility and suspicion of the powerful men who have been his fellow governors and who now set out to destroy him in the name of morality. Brigge is both sympathetic and deeply vulnerable. He genuinely loves Elizabeth and longs for their child to be born, but he is also deeply attracted to Dorcas; he is, however guardedly, of "the old faith" and does not hesitate to hide a priest; he favors the wretched vagrants who infest the roads, seeking shelter and a bite to eat, and employs one of them on his farm. He insists on finding out the truth about the Irishwoman's baby, despite the fact that everybody has already decided on her guilt. In short, without intending to do so, John Brigge offers himself up as a victim by refusing to cooperate with the political and religious masters of the town or to subordinate his own conscience to their demand for rigid obedience and piety. Even his own clerk Adam, whom he regards as a son, turns against him in the end in a struggle that will almost cost Brigge his life and that sends him out into a cold and dangerous world, having sacrificed everything he once held dear, stripped of his power and authority, but made heroic by his commitment to love, truth and human feelings. Havoc, in Its Third Year is a novel of great power, drama and terror, at once a love story and a superb work of historical fiction. It confirms Ronan Bennett's reputation as a masterful creator.