From Charles Johnson—a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America’s preeminent scholars on literature and race—comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing.
An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings. For thirty-three years, Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing. The Way of the Writer is his record of those years, and the coda to a kaleidoscopic, boundary-shattering career.
Organized into six accessible, easy-to-navigate sections, The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process. Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom, starting with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, and delving into the mechanics of scene, dialogue, plot and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer. What separates literature from industrial fiction? What lies at the heart of the creative impulse? How does one navigate the literary world? And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant?
Luminous, inspiring, and imminently accessible, The Way of the Writer is a revelatory glimpse into the mind of the writer and an essential guide for anyone with a story to tell.
- 236 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
Table of contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Introduction
- I. Who Is the Writer?
- II. The Process of Writing
- III. What Helps the Writer?
- IV. The Writer as Teacher
- V. The Writing Life and the Duties of the Writer
- VI. Philosophy and the Writer
- Afterword: Notes from a Former Student by Marc C. Conner
- Acknowledgments
- About Charles Johnson
- Copyright
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Yes, you can access The Way of the Writer by Charles Johnson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Social Science Biographies. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.