Top-Notch Writing Advice from Today's Premiere Writers

This updated edition of the classic, comprehensive guide to creative writing features new topics and writing prompts, contemporary examples, and more. A creative writer’s shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. This best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft. Now in its tenth edition, Writing Fiction is more accessible than ever for writers of all levels—inside or outside the classroom. This new edition continues to provide advice that is practical, comprehensive, and flexible. Moving from freewriting to final revision, Burroway addresses “showing not telling,” characterization, dialogue, atmosphere, plot, imagery, and point of view. It includes new topics and writing prompts, and each chapter now ends with a list of recommended readings that exemplify the craft elements discussed. Plus, examples and quotations throughout the book feature a wide range of today’s best and best-known creators of both novels and short stories.

Language, literature and biography.

"This intermediate/advanced guide to writing fiction emphasizes the revision process and uses craft discussions, exercises, and diverse examples to show the artistic implications of writing choices. This book addresses the major elements of fiction. Numerous examples, questions, and exercises throughout the book help students reflect upon and explore writing possibilities. The mini-anthology includes a variety of highly teachable, illustrative, and diverse stories--North American and international, contemporary and classic, realistic and experimental."--Publisher's website.

A dazzling new anthology of the very best very short fiction from around the world. What is a flash fiction called in other countries? In Latin America it is a micro, in Denmark kortprosa, in Bulgaria mikro razkaz. These short shorts, usually no more than 750 words, range from linear narratives to the more unusual: stories based on mathematical forms, a paragraph-length novel, a scientific report on volcanic fireflies that proliferate in nightclubs. Flash has always—and everywhere—been a form of experiment, of possibility. A new entry in the lauded Flash and Sudden Fiction anthologies, this collection includes 86 of the most beautiful, provocative, and moving narratives by authors from six continents, including best-selling writer Etgar Keret, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, Korean screenwriter Kim Young-ha, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, and Argentinian “Queen of the Microstory” Ana María Shua, among many others. These brilliantly chosen stories challenge readers to widen their vision and celebrate both the local and the universal.

A section on the writing life includes candid discussions of writer's block, talent, habit, rejection, publication, and endurance to help aspiring professionals develop sustainable lives as writers."--Jacket.