Finding Your Writer's Voice
by Frank, Thaisa; Wall, DorothyEdition: 1st
Format: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 1994-10-01
Publisher(s): St Martins Pr
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Summary
An illuminating guide to finding one's most powerful writing tool,Finding Your Writer's Voicehelps writers learn to hear the voices that are uniquely their own. Mixing creative inspiration with practical advice about craft, the book includes chapters on: Accessing raw voice Listening to voices of childhood, public and private voices, and colloquial voices Working in first and third person: discovering a narrative persona Using voice to create characters Shaping one's voice into the form of a story Reigniting the energy of voice during revision
Author Biography
Thaisa Frank teaches writing at U. C. Berkeley and the graduate program at San Francisco State University.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | |
| Telling Begins in an Atmosphere of Urgency | p. 3 |
| Voice: Your Most Powerful Tool | p. 5 |
| The Writer as Singer | p. 8 |
| The Importance of Raw Voice | p. 10 |
| The Voice as an Instrument | p. 15 |
| Inner Listening | p. 20 |
| Distilling Voice | p. 24 |
| Inviting Accidents | p. 26 |
| Listening to the Voice of Childhood | p. 28 |
| Public and Private Voices | p. 32 |
| The Sound of Colloquial Voice | p. 35 |
| The Chorus of Voice | p. 38 |
| Who's Speaking?: Voice and Character | p. 41 |
| Capturing the Inner Critic | p. 46 |
| Learning to Spot the Imposter | p. 49 |
| The Writer as Presence | p. 54 |
| Becoming a Prose Thief | p. 58 |
| Using the Journal Dangerously | p. 61 |
| Writing in the Pressure Cooker: Leading Raw Voice into the Story | p. 65 |
| If | p. 68 |
| Craft and the Voice of the Story | p. 73 |
| Going Deeper into the Story: Voice as Composer and Instrumentalist | p. 77 |
| From Anecdotes to Stories | p. 80 |
| Catalysts for the Story: Character-, Plot-, and Vision-Driven Stories | p. 85 |
| Working with Short Forms to Discover Your Story | p. 90 |
| Point of View | p. 97 |
| Meeting the First-Person Narrator | p. 103 |
| Working with Third Person: Discovering a Narrative Persona | p. 111 |
| Secrets as a Key to Character | p. 117 |
| Finding Dialogue through Impersonation | p. 122 |
| Voice and Tone | p. 127 |
| To Plot or Not to Plot | p. 133 |
| Gender Bending, Race Switching, and Beyond | p. 139 |
| Unity: Discovering a Story's Design | p. 145 |
| Returning to the Pressure Cooker | p. 152 |
| Revision: Exploding the Myth | p. 159 |
| The Art of Reading Your Own Fiction | p. 164 |
| Should Dick Have a Beard?: Meeting Your Editors | p. 169 |
| Listening for the Story Editor | p. 173 |
| Listening for the Sentence Editor | p. 179 |
| The Timing of Revision | p. 184 |
| How to Surprise Yourself in the Middle of Your Story | p. 187 |
| Filtering Feedback | p. 191 |
| When to Rewrite from Scratch | p. 196 |
| Talking to the Stranger: Another Angle on Revision | p. 200 |
| Returning to Raw Voice | p. 205 |
| Voice over the Long Haul | p. 208 |
| Audacity and Ruthlessness: (De)Constructing a Writer's Life | p. 213 |
| The Writer as Character | p. 217 |
| Writing during Hard Times | p. 221 |
| Some Truths about Truth-Telling | p. 226 |
| The Importance of Lying | p. 233 |
| Becoming Your Own Sovereign | p. 237 |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |
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