Telling Stories

The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life

Lee Martin

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781496202024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496202932
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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 providestools 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Writing the Opening of a Short Story
• Juggling Balls
• 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
• 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
• Part 2
• On a Mother’s Birthday, a Writer Loves the World
• Tightening the Screws
• Contradictory Characters
• Odd Couples
• Characterization in the Personal Essay
• Creating Richer Characters
• The Art of the Snark
• Part 3
• My Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson
• Get the Particulars Right
• Know Your Place
• That Kind of Place
• Nostalgia and the Memoirist
• A Detail and All It Can Do
• The Places We Know
• Daydreaming Your Memoir
• The Heart’s Field
• Oh, Those Pesky Facts
• Memoir and the Work of Resurrection
• Using Photos in Memoir
• Ordinary Details in Memoir
• Connecting Particulars
• Context
• Part 4
• 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
• Into the Fire
• Part 5
• Stylin’
• The Value of a Beautiful Sentence
• The Art of the Twerk
• 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
• Alligators and Marshmallows
• Comedy in Fiction
• Part 6
• Taking Flight
• Felt Sense
• More Revision Activities
• The Doorway between Memoir and Fiction
• Proverbs for Revising a Novel
• Part 7
• 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
• Defeating Writer’s Block
• Ten Thoughts on the Writing Life
• Keep Facing the Blank Page
• About Lee Martin