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Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction, 1st edition

Published by Pearson (December 18, 2007) © 2008

  • Diane Thiel Univeristy of New Mexico
$90.66

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Winding Roads:  Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction offers exciting and challenging exercises with accompanying models which help focus student writing and allow instructors to address specific elements of writing creative nonfiction. The numerous exercises set simple tasks, enabling students to practice their technique and develop existing skills.  The process of beginning with small pieces that allow writers to progress to larger endeavors makes writing easier to manage and helps them learn to isolate each element of the piece. 

  • Clear, concise discussions of particular techniques of writing creative nonfiction are followed by practice of these individual techniques. 
  • The book also contains an extensive anthology of essays to use as models, when students write their own essays or parts of exercises.
  • Text includes a very strong section on revision, helping students to consider alternative ways of shaping their essay.
  • Numerous exercises address each element of writing creative nonfiction separately, helping students to understand all the elements included in creating an effective piece of writing.
  • Various approaches to writing creative nonfiction are clearly examined, followed by extensive practice of each specific technique.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Instructor

Introduction

 

I.  Beginning/Points of Inspiration

                                                                                               

                Keeping a Journal

                Family Stories:  History as Heartbeat

                Memory and Imagination

                Telling Lies to tell the Truth

                Making the Old Story New

                A Picture Brings Forth a Thousand Words

                Object Lessons

               

II.  Exercises for Developing Craft and Technique

 

Voice and Style

                Finding Your True Subjects

                A Question of Style

                Conditional Voice

                Breaking the Rules

 

Perspective and Point of View

                Choosing Points of View         

                Innocent Perspective

                Using Biography

               

Detail, Image, and Symbol

                Detailing a Narrative

                Turning Abstractions into Images and Action

                Using all of Your Senses

                Writing from Art

                Symbols, not Cymbals

 

Figurative Language

 

Diction

                Origins of Words

                Foreign Flavor

                Simplify

                Tell-Tale Dialect

                                                               

Setting 

                Setting with Personality

                Setting from Family History

                Setting Your Hometown

               

Creating Tension

                Foundations of Tension

                A Spell of Trouble: Conflict and Tension

                Reversing the Action

                Trading Characters, Settings, Conflicts

                Reverberating Closure

 

Rhythm

                Finding Your Rhythm

                Song and Story

                Listening to Nature

 

Character and Dialogue

                Populating a Piece

                Inside a Character’s Mind

                Compelling Characters

                Dialogue Dropping from the Eaves         

 

III.  Exercises for Exploring Revision, Sub-genres and Frequent Concerns of Creative Nonfiction

 

Revision 

                Re-reading, Re-imagining, Re-shaping

                What’s in a Name: Finding a Title

                Revision: Beyond the Frame

                Revision: Re-imagining Character and Conflict

                Creating Scenes:  A Revision Narrative

                Workshop: Thirteen Ways of Looking for Revision

               

Exploring the Sub-genres of Creative Nonfiction

                               


                From Memory to Memoir

                Biographical Sketch: Researching a Life

                Personal Opinion Essay: Taking a Stand

                Living Sources: Gathering and Using Information

                Reflective Writing:  Reflecting on the World

                Writing About Place

                A Piece of History

               

Exploring Frequent Concerns of Creative Nonfiction

 

                Finding the Emotional Truth

                Writing Between the Lines:  Subtext

                Time-lines and the Larger Context

                The Passage of Time

                Mapping Your Memory

                Vignettes

                Writing Inside the Story: Meta-writing

 

 

IV.  A Collection of Creative Nonfiction

 

            Diane Ackerman, “The Truth about Truffles”

            Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me”

            Rudolfo Anaya, “Why I Love Tourists: Confessions of a Dharma Bum”

            Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods”

            Philip Brady, “Myth and Uncertainty” from To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigration and the Afterlife

            Bruce Chatwin, from In Patagonia

            Wayson Choy, from Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood

            Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Silent Dancing”

            Fred D’Aguiar, “A Son in Shadow”

            Edwidge Danticat, “Westbury Court”

            Rhina Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingue”

            Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Splendor and Squalor” from Among the White Moon Faces:  An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

            Dana Gioia, “Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader’s Childhood”

            Joy Harjo, “The Flying Man”

            Jamaica Kincaid, “Biography of a Dress”

            Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative”

            Naomi Shihab Nye, “Three Pokes of a Thistle”

            Hilda Raz, “Looking at Aaron” from What Becomes You

            Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination”

            Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

            Diane Thiel, “Crossing the Border” from The White Horse: A Colombian Journey

            Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

            Alice Walker, “Am I Blue”

            Anthony Walton, from Mississippi

            Terry Tempest Williams, “Peregrine Falcon,” from Refuge

 

 

V.  Writers About the Art of Creative Nonfiction

 

                Margaret Atwood, “Nine Beginnings”

                Lee Gutkind, “The Creative Nonfiction Police”

                Tracy Kidder, “Making the Truth Believable”

                Brett Lott, “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction”

                Gregory Martin, “Other People’s Memories”

                John McNally, “Humor Incarnate”

                Sue Miller, “From a Lecture on Revision”

Diane Thiel is the author of six books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2000),

Writing Your Rhythm

(2001), The White Horse: A Colombian Journey (2004), Resistance Fantasies (2004), Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres (Longman, 2005) and Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry (Longman, 2005). Her work appears in major journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review,The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, among numerous others, and is reprinted in more than 30 major anthologies, including Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2004) and Contemporary American Poetry (Longman, 2005). Thiel received her BA and MFA from Brown University and has traveled and lived in various countries in Europe and South America. She has been a professor of creative writing for more than 15 years. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a recent Fulbright Scholar, she is on the creative writing faculty at the University of New Mexico.

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