Required reading has never been so hot. Once upon a time there was a Brooklyn hipster named Norah. Unlucky in love, and short on extracurriculars for her college apps, Norah decided to start a book group. She knew the perfect locale -- a local indie bookstore with a crush-worthy cutie manning the soy latte counter. When the first meeting arrives, Norah gets a page-turning surprise. The attendees may be bookish, but there are also a few hotties! Most noteworthy: sweet, literary James. He's like a modern Jane Austen hero.... Only, how to snag him? Ever the romantic heroine, Norah devises a secret plan. And if it works, Norah may just find her "Happily Ever After" love story. The End.

Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure takes you step-by-step through finding and developing ideas, brainstorming stories, and crafting a solid plan for your novel--including a one-sentence pitch, summary hook blurb, and working synopsis. Over 100 different exercises lead you through the novel-planning process, with ten workshops that build upon each other to flesh out your idea as much or as little as you need to do to start writing. Find Exercises On: - Creating Characters - Choosing Point of View - Determining the Conflict - Finding Your Process - Developing Your Plot - And So Much More! Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure is an easy-to-follow guide to planning your novel, as well as a handy tool for revising a first draft, or fixing a novel that isn't quite working.

A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor's life as shewrites her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheekrumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist's daily life, and theact of endurance the writer must perform. Through an extendedsequence of photographs taken on a hand-me-down camera, accompanied by terse,evocative captions, the book spans several years of labour andprocrastination, elation and despair. The details of the outside worldintrude as McGregor works on the novel alone in her Bondi flat, with nothingbut a desk, a pin-board, a laptop and a cat, and in studio spaces in Berlin and Estonia. McGregor's voice iswry, vulnerable, at times caustic, capturing the colloquial qualities of herfiction and the durational nature of her performance art via the ephemeral andessential thoughts that take up an author's days, weeks, and years.

Each of the sixty reproducible classroom-ready activities has general guidelines that describe the purposes for the project, how to use it, evaluation points, and variations that increase student participation and motivation, and a variety of assessment activities. Designed around the new IRA/NCTE Standards, (reading, writing, representing, viewing, speaking, and listening) these stimulating activities applicable to a variety of novels create opportunities for students to develop their skills as readers, writers, and speakers. Three sections center on reading and writing activity projects (e.g., essays, news stories, letters), visual display projects (e.g., charts, posters, bookmarks), and speaking and listening activities.

This concise yet comprehensive study explores innovative practice in the novel and, from the perspective of creative writing, the astonishing resilience of the novel form. It offers a practical guide to the many possibilities available to the writer of the novel, with each chapter offering exercises to encourage innovation and to expand the creative writer's narrative skills. Beginning with early iterations of the novel in the 17th century, this book follows the evocation of innovation in the novel through Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism and into today's dizzying array of digital and interactive possibilities. While guiding the reader through the possibilities available (in both genre and literary fiction), this book encourages both aspiring and established writers to produce novels with imagination, playfulness and gravitas. Dynamic and interactive, this text is distinctive in offering a grounding in the literary history of the novel, while also equipping readers to write in the form themselves. It is an essential resource for any student of creative writing, or anyone with an interest in writing their own novel.

Lawrence and Cranton present a unique research methodology involving fictional characters as research participants. Transformative learning themes are identified through a content analysis of six contemporary novels. The characters from these novels are invited to come to a virtual space, the Butterfly Café where they engage in a series of dialogues on the research themes related to their transformative learning experiences. Each of the dialogues is followed by a debriefing session to deepen the understanding of the original themes Readers are given a window into Lawrence and Cranton’s analysis and interpretive process as they engage in dialogue with Celie from the Color Purple, Macon from Accidental Tourist, Mariam and Laila from A Thousand Splendid Suns, and others. The dialogues become a story within the stories told in the novels. The end product is the introduction of a new model of transformative learning based on a metaphor of planting, cultivating, and growing seeds. Central to the model is becoming conscious, a process that appeared in each of the novels. Readers will find insights into transformative learning that are outside of the standard academic treatment of the topic. Moving the research into the realm of fiction provides the opportunity for a creative exploration of transformative learning. Yet, since fiction inevitably mirrors reality, readers will be able to relate the analysis, the dialogues, and the ensuing model to their own lives and to their adult education practice.