Creative Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Creative writing may be fun, but it isn’t easy. It requires some imagination, a degree of application, and a great deal of effort.

This book gathers everything you need to know about writing and publishing all kinds of creative writing. It distills my more than 30 years of experience in journalism, novel-writing, teaching creative writing, and working in publishing, all in one place. I share the basics – and some of the extras – of writing novels, stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, biography, and autobiography. I discuss journalism and blogging and offer pointers on how to get published or successfully publish yourself.

I try to give you the essence of what a life’s work spent in loving reading and writing literature in all its forms has taught me, to help you avoid repeating some of my mistakes!

This book aims to help you gain confidence in your ideas, to inspire you, and to provide the knowledge and skills you need to get started on your writing journey.

About This Book

Most people who write start off by spending a lot of time alone, puzzling out how to tackle the various difficulties and challenges that writing brings up. How do you know what to write about? Where should you begin? What point of view should you tell the story from? How do you write dialogue that leaps off the page, invent intriguing characters, and describe places and objects so that the reader can see them? Should you write your story as an autobiography, or turn it into a novel? And how ...