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    Telling Stories
    The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life

    Lee Martin (Author)

    9781496202024

    Paperback / softback, published 1 October 2017

    258 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.364 kg

    “‘Why shouldn’t good writing be hard? It’s our attempt at salvation,’ Lee Martin says in this exceptional book. Martin, through craft lessons, exercises, and literary examples, helps writers discover salvation one carefully selected word at a time.”-Sue William Silverman, author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
     
    “Lee Martin has long been one of my favorite writers of fiction and memoir, and now he’s one of my favorite writers of advice about the writer’s craft. Everyone who writes, or wants to, should read this wise and inspiring book.”-David Jauss, author of On Writing Fiction

    A prolific and award-winning writer, Lee Martin has put pen to paper to offer his wisdom, honed during thirty years of teaching the oh-so-elusive art of writing. Telling Stories is intended for anyone interested in thinking more about the elements of storytelling in short stories, novels, and memoirs. Martin clearly delineates helpful and practical techniques for demystifying the writing process and provides tools for perfecting the art of the scene, characterization, detail, point of view, language, and revision-in short, the art of writing. His discussion of the craft in his own life draws from experiences, memories, and stories to provide a more personal perspective on the elements of writing.

    Martin provides encouragement by sharing what he’s learned from his journey through frustrations, challenges, and successes. Most important, Telling Stories emphasizes that you are not alone on this journey and that writers must remain focused on what they love: the process of moving words on the page. By focusing on that purpose, Martin contends, the journey will always take you where you’re meant to go.
     

    Acknowledgments
    Introduction
    Part 1. Structure: Once upon a Time
    Writing the Opening of a Short Story
    Juggling Balls: An Exercise for Opening a Short Story
    Using Mystery to Open Your Story
    Trouble? I’
    ve Seen Trouble
    Making a Scene
    The Inevitable Surprise
    Framing the Story
    Character and Incident
    I Didn’
    t Expect That
    One Way to Structure a Memoir
    Organizing the Memoir
    The Layers of Memoir
    I Was Wearing Them the Day: Touchstone Moments and Details for the Fiction Writer
    Yogi Berra and the Art of Flash Nonfiction
    Mad Libs for Creative Nonfiction
    Enough about Me, Tell Me What You Think about Me
    Shrinking a Novel
    Preparing the Final Scene by Avoiding Conflict
    Here We Are at the End
    Taking Care at the End: The Art of Misdirection
    Part 2. Characterization: There Were Three Little Pigs
    On a Mother’
    s Birthday, a Writer Loves the World
    Tightening the Screws: Putting Pressure on Our Characters
    Contradictory Characters
    Odd Couples: The Writer as Matchmaker
    Characterization in the Personal Essay
    Creating Richer Characters
    The Art of the Snark
    Part 3. Detail: A House of Straw, a House of Sticks, a House of Bricks
    My Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson
    Get the Particulars Right
    Know Your Place
    That Kind of Place: An Argument for Nostalgia
    Nostalgia and the Memoirist
    A Detail and All It Can Do
    The Places We Know: What Richard Ford Taught Me
    Daydreaming Your Memoir
    The Heart’
    s Field: Place in Fiction
    Oh, Those Pesky Facts: What’
    s a Memoir Writer to Do?
    Memoir and the Work of Resurrection
    Using Photos in Memoir
    Ordinary Details in Memoir
    Connecting Particulars
    Context
    Part 4. Point of View: “
    Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me Come In”

    Your Point of View Choice Creates the Effect of the Story
    The Inner Story of the Writer’
    s Thinking
    Finding a Different Lens
    Memoir and the Future
    Living Full: Avoiding Sentimentality in Memoir
    Into the Fire
    Part 5. Language: “
    Not by the Hair of My Chinny Chin Chin”

    Stylin’

    The Value of a Beautiful Sentence
    The Art of the Twerk: Writing the Miley Cyrus Way
    Communal and Personal Voices
    Voice in Creative Nonfiction
    Personae and Tone in Fiction
    Paying Attention to Form in Flash Nonfiction
    The Kite
    The Thing Said: Ten Thoughts on Writing Dialogue in Memoir
    Alligators and Marshmallows: A Lesson in Humor
    Comedy in Fiction
    Part 6. Revision: And the Third Little Pig Lived Happily Ever After
    Taking Flight: First Drafts
    Felt Sense: Focusing on Revision
    More Revision Activities
    The Doorway between Memoir and Fiction
    Proverbs for Revising a Novel
    Part 7. The Writing Life: The Two Little Pigs Now Felt Sorry for Having Been So Lazy and Built Their Houses with Bricks
    My Mother’
    s Gifts to Me
    My Aunt among the Rocks
    Five Ways We Keep Ourselves from Writing
    Five Things All Writers Can Control
    Reading Like a Writer
    Writing to Preserve
    Travel and the Writer
    Slowing Down
    Our Quiet Places
    What Fills Us
    The Books and the Boys of Summer
    A Writer Writes: A Lifelong Apprenticeship
    Defeating Writer’
    s Block
    Ten Thoughts on the Writing Life
    Keep Facing the Blank Page
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