Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writers' Guide and Anthology is a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing in a variety of short forms. The authors introduce both traditional and innovative approaches to the short form and demonstrate how it possesses structure, logic, and coherence while simultaneously resisting expectations. With discussion questions, writing prompts, flash interviews and glossary of key terms, the book covers: - Prose poetry - Flash and micro fiction - The lyric essay - Short shorts - Micro memoir - Cross-genre/hybrid writing - Nano fiction - Sudden fiction - Drabble - Vignette - Postcard poems/fiction Short-Form Creative Writing also includes an anthology, offering inspiring examples of short-form writing in all of the styles covered by the book, including work by: Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorges Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Trevor Dodge, Grant Faulkner, Robert Hass, Ilya Kaminsky, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Philip Levine, Anne Sexton and many others.
Author(s): H.K Hummel and Stephanie Lenox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Year: 2019
Language: English
Commentary: decrypted from B8B345463927E7C16637264DBC8C36BE source file
Pages: 329
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Preface
Why write short?
How we’ve organized each chapter
Relevant readings
Flash interviews
Free dives
Vignettes
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshops
Getting started
Part I An Introduction to Short-Form Creative Writing
1 A Long History of the Short Form
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Pía Barros
Free dive
Vignette: Urgency and the short form
In the beginning
A note on genre
Flash fiction
Prose poetry
Flash nonfiction
What is short-form writing?
Two worlds collide
Dissecting the dinosaur
Conclusion: Stealing strategies
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
Part II The Craft of Short-Form Creative Writing
2 Picture This
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Calvin Mills
Free dive
Vignette: If you hand me the right map
Stare: Educate the eye
Image as epiphany
The stereoscopic image
Not just scenery
Conclusion: Moving images
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
3 Voice, Character, and Narrator
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Sarah Evans
Free dive
Vignette: Stephanie’s stamp collection
Overview
Hearing voices
Dialogue basics
Point of view
First-person singular
First-person plural
Second person
Third-person singular
The unreliable narrator
Authentic dialogue
Asking questions
Dialogue format
Is “said” dead?
Conventional versus unconventional format
Multidimensional dialogue
The psychological gesture
The show/tell ratio
Recognizing clichés and stereotypes
Conclusion: What are your characters made of?
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
4 Moving through Time and Space
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Karen E. Bender
Free dive
Vignette: Tonight, at the Santee Drive-in Theatre
The narrative dilemma
Self-contained worlds
The flexibility of time: A few illustrations
The space-time continuum
Endless possibilities
Conclusion: Sneak in, slip out
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
5 The Microcosmic Sentence
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Justin Torres
Free dive
Vignette: Beginning and ending with a dot
What is a sentence?
All about relationships
What is structure?
A blueprint for thought
What is syntax?
A marriage of music and meaning
What is style?
Unity
Variety
Pattern
Making short sentences
Making long sentences
Making fragments
Conclusion: Make the sentence your own
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
6 How to Leap: Ah-ha Moments and Associative Logic
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Bryan Fry
Free dive
Vignette: West Coast girl goes South
And, suddenly, I knew .....
Context, text, and subtext
Once upon a time
The involuntary imagination
The hidden parts of a story
Entrances
Exits
Gestalt theory for flash
Figurative language in a flash
Synecdoche and metonymy
Conclusion: Follow the path
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
7 Translucent Design
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Ada Limón
Free dive
Vignette: The jackalope
The invisible workaday paragraph
Charming snakes and snake charming
The rule of threes
Integrating sound patterns
Integrating nonsound patterns
Conclusion: Black bear against night sky
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
8 Beg, Borrow, and Steal
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Steve Coughlin
Free dive
Vignette: Terra incognita
Be a hermit crab
Forms to borrow, steal, and make your own
ABC
Advertisement
Aphorism
Autobiography/biography
Character sketch
Confession
Collage
Definition
Dream
Fable
Fairytale/frame story
Instructions
Inventory/list
Letter
Vignette
Conclusion: Extreme restriction and a note of caution
9 Finding the Funny
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Matthew Clarke
Free dive
Vignette: Dead frogs and rooftop dolphins
The soul of wit
Your funny bone
Where to start?
Comic treatments
“What if”/“yes, and”
Timing, context, structure
The short form as trickster
Surprise, surprise
Conclusion: Where jokes come from
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
10 Misfit Pleasures
Relevant readings
Flash interview with Alex Carr Johnson
Free dive
Vignette: Talk to me (a Wunderkammer)
A taxonomy of the strange
Useful distortion
Fragmentation and atomization
Conclusion: The art of miniaturization
Exercises
Prompts
One-sentence workshop
11 Not So Fast! Strategic Revision
Relevant readings
A flash conversation on revision
Cut it down
Ask for more
Weigh each word
Listen closely
Test the limits
Remember what’s critical
Free dive
Gaming the draft
Building and shaping
Begin with “what if?”
Make friends with your doubts
Exercise 1: Seeing the waterfall
Exercise 2: Fact-check yourself
Exercise 3: Get your hands dirty
Exercise 4: The layers of revision
Ten steps toward revision
Exercise 5: Breaking and unbreaking lines of text
Exercise 6: Exploding the text
Exercise 7: Shaving with Occam’s Razor
Conclusion: The Beautiful Lightning
Part III Short-Form Creative Writing Anthology
Cookie Monster on the Dole
All This
A Story Possibly Heard in Some Bar at Three in the Morning
Be Drunken
My Grading Scale for the Fall Semester, Composed Entirely of Samuel Beckett Quotes
A
B
C
D
E
F
The Man Who Hated Us and Then Forgot
One Long Sentence
Thin Cities 5
Grip
The Cat
Rules of Combat
Boy at Night
Letter to a Funeral Parlor
For My Sister in the River
Self-Portrait as a Chimera
My Devils
The Prose Poem as a Beautiful Animal
Dust
Time Travel
Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica
A Thousand Perfect Strangers
Dinner Party
Poland
Hill Street Blues
Dumped: Seven Cautionary Tales
Bob and Betty
Gina and George
Dana and David
Linda and Liam
Kim and Krishna
Tom and Tilde
Sean and Susan
What You Are
Memoir
A Modern Fable
8 Meetings Nobody Scheduled
Natalia
La Jungla
The Letter from Home
The Quiet Machine
Some Things about That Day
Surplus History
the invisible girl can be anything she wants when she doesn’t want to be invisible
The Girl Who Likes Dogs
The Dinosaur
Gravity, Reduced
On Miniatures
Pleasant, healthy-appearing adult white female in no acute distress
Dinosaur
Short Lecture on Your Own Happiness
Life Story
go-go tarot
Cannibals and Explorers
An All-Purpose Product
Consequence
In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club
Icelandic Hurricane
The Box
The Inventory from a Year Lived Sleeping with Bullets
Immigrant Haibun
Scheherazade.
Small Meditations
A Letter to Deb Clow
Excerpt from “Four about Death”
Author Bios
Acknowledgments
Genre Index
Index
