Helen Plum Library

Anne Lamott recounts her personal experiences to reveal her writing techniques and how she overcomes obstacles that interfere with the writing flow. She offers concrete suggestions about character, plot, setting, and other topics of interest to writers. She also offers advice about how to navigate through the dark underbelly feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and jealousy that are inevitable parts of any writer's experience

Someday, your life story is likely to be boiled down to a few lines. If you leave things to chance, your obituary is almost sure to be solemn, formulaic, and full of errors--an obligatory final chapter written in haste by others. James R. Hagerty, longtime obit writer for The Wall Street Journal, knows how to get the job done right: Do it yourself, starting now, while you still can. In this heartfelt and reassuring guide, Hagerty explains how to...

"A retired bestselling author hosts a one-of-a-kind competition, with high risks and high rewards-giving the winner a chance to change lives. Lucy Hart has come a long way since feeling the cold neglect of her parents, whose attention always centered around her chronically ill sister's needs. Now a twenty-six-year-old teacher's aide, Lucy is able to share her love of books with bright, young students, and one in particular, a seven-year-old orphan...

What's the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year...

"Featuring speculative fiction-writing exercises from Harlan Ellison (R), Piers Anthony, Ramsey Campbell, Jack Ketchum, screenwriters of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and many more. The fifth volume in the acclaimed Now Write! writing-guide series offers a full toolbox of advice and exercises for speculative fiction writers hoping to craft an engaging alternate reality, flesh out an enthralling fantasy quest, or dream up a...

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And...

Combing anecdotes and hard-won lessons from decades of teaching and writing--and invoking everyone from Hemingway to your third-grade teacher--retired professor Thomas C. Foster guides you through the basics of writing. With How to Write Like a Writer you'll learn how to organize your thoughts, construct first drafts, and (not incidentally) keep you in your chair so that inspiration can come to visit

A widely admired writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg now gives us a distillation of that experience in an distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. Here he sets out to help us unlearn that "wisdom"--about...

Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced--and how they surmounted them

Uniquely fusing practical advice on writing with his own insights into the craft, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes constructs beautiful prose about the issues would-be writers are most afraid to articulate:  • How do I dare write?  • Where do I begin?  • What do I do with this story I have to tell that fills and breaks my heart?  Rich with personal vignettes about Rhode's sources of inspiration, How to Write is also a memoir...