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Notes on Writing Fiction
From bestselling and award-winning author and professor Elizabeth McCracken comes an irresistible look at the art of writing.
Writing can feel like an endless series of decisions. How does one face the blank page? Move a character around a room? Deal with time? Undertake revision? The good and bad news is that in fiction writing, there are no definitive answers to such questions: writers must come up with their own. Elizabeth McCracken, author of bestselling novels, National Book Award long-listed story collections, and a highly praised memoir, has been teaching for more than thirty-five years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. "Writing is a long game," she notes. "What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-forgiveness: every life needs both."
As much a book about the life of a working artist as it is a guide to thinking about fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource for any writer.
"Elizabeth McCracken was my teacher, and it's a joy to know that now more people will have access to her brilliance through A Long Game. The book is intellectually rigorous with its philosophical and artistic deliberations on the art of fiction writing, and it is also full of tender humor, understanding, and respect for writers at any stage of their careers. It's a treasure box for any teacher of creative writing, a guidebook for any fiction writer, and a problem-solving and cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business." —Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow
"A Long Game is the most generous, idiosyncratic, useful, and companionable book on writing I've ever read. It's basically a portable Elizabeth McCracken. How did we get so lucky?" —Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth
This information about A Long Game was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and the forthcoming collection of short stories The Souvenir Museum. She's received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.
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