This is an essential book for everyone who wants to write clearly about any subject and use writing as a means of learning.

If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers. Recognizing the importance that modeling plays in the learning process, high school English teacher Kelly Gallagher shares how he gets his students to stand next to and pay close attention to model writers, and how doing so elevates his students' writing abilities. Write Like This is built around a central premise: if students are to grow as writers, they need to read good writing, they need to study good writing, and, most important, they need to emulate good writers. In Write Like This, Kelly emphasizes real-world writing purposes, the kind of writing he wants his students to be doing twenty years from now. Each chapter focuses on a specific discourse: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. In teaching these lessons, Kelly provides mentor texts (professional samples as well as models he has written in front of his students), student writing samples, and numerous assignments and strategies proven to elevate student writing. By helping teachers bring effective modeling practices into their classrooms, Write Like This enables students to become better adolescent writers. More important, the practices found in this book will help our students develop the writing skills they will need to become adult writers in the real world.

These inspirational and practical quotes come from 500+ podcast interviews with hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries. In Book 2, authors share their honest reflections on Learning to Write. These quotes reveal that there are many paths to learning how to write. Authors quoted include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Ron Rash, C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Jason Mott, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, David Joy, Gavin Edwards, and many more. Author Bud Schill says that “if you were to put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, for an infinite period of time, eventually they would write a Shakespearean sonnet.” New York Times bestselling novelist C.J. Box didn’t bang around like a bunch of monkeys to obtain his success, but admits he was self-taught: “I deconstructed the books I really liked on my own to figure out how that author got me into it, what the pace was, what the arc was, the point of view.” New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash says, “We're not making McDonald's hamburgers. There’s just no clear-cut way to do it.” And award-winning author Renea Winchester quips, “The best thing that an author can have is a writing friend who’s immensely more successful than they are,” a point that New York Timesbestselling novelist Craig Johnson echoes when he says “I learned more in four hours talking with Tony Hillerman than I may have gotten in an entire year master's degree in writing.”

Chronicles Heinrich Harrer's first attempt to climb the north face of the Swiss Eiger mountain in 1938.

For more than thirty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering on writers with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she brings together Zen meditation and writing in a new way. Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice—"it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind." This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes new forewords by Julia Cameron and Bill Addison. It also includes a new preface in which Goldberg reflects on the enduring quality of the teachings here. She writes, "What have I learned about writing over these thirty years? I’ve written fourteen books, and it’s the practice here in Bones that is the foundation, sustaining and building my writing voice, that keeps me honest, teaches me how to endure the hard times and how to drop below discursive thinking, to taste the real meat of our minds and the life around us."

Eudora Welty was one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary figures. For as long as students have been studying her fiction as literature, writers have been looking to her to answer the profound questions of what makes a story good, a novel successful, a writer an artist. On Writing presents the answers in seven concise chapters discussing the subjects most important to the narrative craft, and which every fiction writer should know, such as place, voice, memory, and language. But even more important is what Welty calls “the mystery” of fiction writing—how the writer assembles language and ideas to create a work of art. Originally part of her larger work The Eye of the Story but never before published in a stand- alone volume, On Writing is a handbook every fiction writer, whether novice or master, should keep within arm’s reach. Like The Elements of Style, On Writing is concise and fundamental, authoritative and timeless—as was Eudora Welty herself.

This is the one guide that anyone who writes--whether student, business person, or professional writer--should put on the desk beside pencil, pen, typewriter, or word processor. Filled with professional tips and a wealth of instructive examples, this valuable, easy-to-use handbook can help you solve any and all writing problems.